Yet Another New Blog
Yes, I know that Alexis Nexus has floundered a bit. Mostly we just argue about who said what now.

And yet, due to some people being interested in it, I'm starting a groupblog about Men, Various Masculinities and Feminism: Feminist Allies. Looking for more people to be part of it; right now I'm all alone out there, though two or three people should be coming along soon enough.

Go Check it out. In the grand tradition of bloggers everywhere, I've started the whole thing out by just throwing up some links. :)


Filed under:Feminism and Masculinities.

Sexuality, Love, and One Man's Feminism, Part One
There are intersections of identity, and then there are intersections of identity. And the place where my politics and my sexuality meet is a great big traffc jam of identity.

Politics and Finding Love
Talking to my therapist recently, I realized that the intersection of my politics and my views on romance is somewhat more labyrinthian than I thought it was. My therapist had pointed out that it is the case that sometimes our politics and our romantic relationships can find themselves at odds. For instance, there have been times when I have been told by a lover that my raising my voice at her is much different (i.e. less acceptable) than her raising her voice at me. This claim is legitimate, it seems to me; as a general rule, when men raise their voices at women, there is an evocation of a pre-existing power dynamic which I want to avoid. And as a feminist, I think it's important that I keep this power dynamic in mind when arguing with anybody--and 'anybody' includes a lover--and to recognize and subvert it whenever I can. But having to keep this in mind in the face of being yelled at by a lover can be an extremely difficult thing to do--keeping myself from raising my voice is one thing; keeping myself from responding in kind to somebody to whom I am vulnerable in the intimate way that a lover can be, is really hard to do. Worth the effort, I think, but still difficult.

Another example: My politics, to the degree that they include queer theory (and to some degree feminism in general), make me sort of predisposed to like queer/queer-minded women--and that includes romantically. Sadly, the number of queer and queer-minded women who might like dating a man (even a feminist man) can seem at times to be vanishingly small. Yeah, yeah, more whining about how I can't find love because I'm so darn progressive. It's sort of self-serving and self-congradulatory. Still, it is sometimes how I feel. (And, actually, I doubt that the number of femnist women who want to date feminist men is vanishingly small--more likely the general ways that I meet people just don't lead to meeting queer-minded women who like men like myself.) To the extent that my politics shape who I'm attracted to romantically and sexually, and to the degree that my politics are feminist and queer-friendsly, it feels like I'm limiting my chances of finding love, romance and/or sex in a very real way.

Politics and Getting Some
So all of this can get incredibly complex for me to think about, much less for me to live through. But then it occurred to me, that mixed up in all of this was something that is on the surface a wee little bit simpler to think about, but maybe just as important: How my sex life is tied up with my politics, and how my political bent has made my sex life itself, as well as my relationship to sex and to my lovers more complex.

Disclaimer: Pretty much everything that follows is based upon generalizations, almost all of which have exceptions, even in my own specific examples. That is, when I talk about 'lovers' who are into x,y and z, it's a certainty that there are exceptions. So if any of y'all know any of my lovers, or think you do, or want to, keep in mind that any generalization I make here might not apply to any particular individual.

As I have worked on this post over a couple of days, the more I think about how my feminism and my sex life come together (no pun intended), the less I think that it actually is any simpler than, say, how feminism affects my lovelife in general. Part of that is because sex and romance are intextricably intertwined, I think--at least they are for me. But part of it is that the intricacies of feminism and sex are myriad. I'm not going to try to address them all. I'm going to focus on one in particular.

First off, there's what I'll call, for want of a more precise phrase, the expressed 'desire for a dom' that my lovers have routinely suprised me with. I recognize that there are several technical ways that those in the BDSM community use the term 'dom', and that I'm likely misusing it here. I'm going to use it as a blanket term to cover a general feel for the power relationships that my sexual relationships have seemed to default to. The way it works is this: From the very start, though I am shy and often slow-moving when it comes to sex, I am often the initiator. This goes for the first kiss all the way down to the first roleplay. It's not that simple, of course, because there is never (one hopes) just one initiator. Rather, the move into sex is as layered as sexual attraction can be, and all involved usually are initiating things--maybe some more obviously than others. But the fact still remains that I seem to run into a standard expectation that I be the initiator--at the very least--and the dom a good deal of the time.

Of course, it's not the case that only men can be doms. And it's not simply the case that dominating somebody sexually is being more 'masculine' in some way. But, of course, the whole dom/sub dynamic, in its myriad forms, doesn't take place outside of culture. It is informed by sexism, by feminism, and, in my case, by my personal views of masculinity. That so many of my sexual relationships have felt one-sided in this way isn't that strange, I suppose. In a way, it's just an extension of ways that our gender roles affect our interactions--it's still the case that men are more often expected to ask women out than vice-versa (I wonder if it's the case that butch women are more often expected to ask femme women out?). That men are more often expected to be the initiator sexually sort of grows right out of that, if we let it. And then, if dom/sub roles come into play at all, it's not suprising that we can easily attatch some gender roles to them as well. It seems to me that even when men are subs and women are dommes, there is something going on with genderfucking there--it is hot for all involved partly because it flies in the face of the norms of gender roles.

Enough About You, Let's Talk About Me
Which brings me sort of back to my relationship to being the initiator and/or dominant sexually. I'm happy and thankful that a lover in my early sexual life with other people (which, ahem, wasn't as early, really, as my sexual life with myself!) taught me that the standards which I had created for myself regarding sex with women--egalitarianism in all things, processing, not being demanding, not assuming anything (I was always the guy who asked a woman I was attracted to if I could kiss her)--while important, ought to sometimes be thrown out the window. And not only after processing it all. Sometimes, she explained, a woman likes to be kissed without the asking part. Don't men? And I'm talking about kissing here, but of course there was more to it than that. And, thankfully, she was willing to show me about the 'more to it than that' stuff as well.

But this was also, in a way, the beginnings of some of my confusion about sexuality, gender, feminism and masculinity. Because, in a simplistic way, what she was helping me to understand is that she wanted a thoughtful, respectful, feminist guy--but she also wanted him to slide right into what I see as a stereotypically negative gender role: The man who takes what he wants and cares only about himself; the man who is in control, who needs to be in control; the man that I desperately do not want to be.

Again, all of this is oversimplifying. There are all sorts of nuances that I'm not delving into. And it may be that within the nuances I'll find some solace. But as it stands, I am frustrated by my inability to navigate this stuff emotionally, and to find lovers who will navigate it with me long-term. I know that the may exist--I've had a taste of lovers who will navigate this stuff with me, as I will navigate the other side(s) of the issues with them. But I think it's rare, and it's not the sort of thing that one can really figure out alone, I think...

More later.
Filed under:Feminism, Masculinities and Therapy.

News Flash! Real Men Are Cowboys! Who Drive Cars! And Use Cell Phones! Laugh, Dammit!
I have a love/hate relationship with the comic strip For Better or for Worse. In some ways, it's great because it's pretty open-minded and liberal. They've dealt with a gay character (though I have to say I don't know what happened to him) who was going through some coming-out stuff in high school, if I remember, in a relatively positive way. You see much more of the mom dealing with her business than you do of the father, who is a dentist.

At any rate, I think it sometimes delves beneath the surface of family/friends stuff. But then sometimes it just gets smarmy as heck. And last week's strips made me cringe. It was like seeing a whole slew of comedians whose whole acts were "Isn't it funny how men do X and women do Y?" But I even have mixed feelings about them, because there's a sense in which the girls are making fun of the men--but they're not making fun of them to question the masculinity involved with, in this case, liking cars a lot, but rather with a sort of 'well, boys will be boys' attitude; a wink and a nudge.

It all starts with "men are cowboys and cars are their horses":

Next, men are cowboys and phones are thier guns:
See, don't those men look funny! With their phones all ringing! Because, y'know, women don't have cell phones.

Next up, making fun of the men for how they use their guns...er, cell phones:
See, it's funny because men use their cell phones in that irritating way!
Eventually, the dad in the comic (who has a new sportscar!) gets a ticket for speeding in his new, "manly" car, (which, frankly, looks like a gremlin or something to me), and lays the old 'do as I say not as I do" schpeil on his daughter:
Because, you know, men can do that sort of thing, if only to set poor examples for the women around them.

And isn't it funny?!

Ech.
Filed under:
Comics as Life, Feminism and Masculinities

Be a Man: On Gender, Masculinities and Avoiding the Default
Lots of stuff lately has me thinking about gender. And not just gender theory stuff: In particular, my own gender identity. Just like recognizing that being 'white' in this society is a position of priviledge to such a degree that awareness of 'whiteness' must be cultivated--as it isn't something white people are aware of--recognizing that the priviledge of being male is an ongoing (forever?) process. Sometimes it seems like my blind spots (everybody's blindspots?) are infinite.

Therapy Digs Deeper
Little Professor had a post the other day which details some of her thoughts on how our brains work as regards identity formation. One part of her post has stayed with me. She says:

"My kind correspondent Gus in KC has already read my ramblings about the existential nature of trauma and change: namely, that once immediate needs are met (relief of significant pain, physical security, etc.), major human adaptation is fundamentally a question of identity. If this thing happens to me, who am I? Who have I become? Who was I before?"

Riffing on this idea, I got to thinking about how my therapy sessions have gone since I started. I only go every other week, so I haven't been much, but the flavor of the time I spend with my therapist changed after the initial visit, and continues to do so. My first visit, given that I was so emotionally pent-up with sadness, was basically just a catharsis, a crying jag with a little bit of insight thrown in for good measure. It might be strtching things to say I was dealing with trauma, but it certainly felt traumatic relative to other things that I've experienced. (And I do count myself lucky for having some of the most traumatic events in my life be 'only' about rejection of romantic love and such.) To abuse Little Prof's theme, once my trauma was taken care of, we've moved on to talking about how I might adapt to the world in my own life.

So we're delving a bit deeper down. Some of that involves looking at my past, but a lot of it just involves being able to put into words some of my emotional states. For instance, I have some anger, sadness and guilt. My therapist is very big on the whole 'allowing oneself to feel' such negative emotions, and is quick to point out that I don't have to know the cause of any or all of them--but then is also quick to add that it's helpful to understand how, say, my anger at somebody/somthing relates to my sadness about other things; or how my anxiety relates to my anger. Etcetera.

Mama's Boy: Woman-Identified
And one place that I want to do a bunch of work--no suprise here--is gender. I want to better understand my relationships with women, and with other men. I want to better understand my relationship to femininity, and perhaps more important only because it has been less looked at by me, to masculinity.

My therapist had two great insights the last time we met, full of lots of potential threads of inquiry. First, she noted that some of my anger issues might have to do with being a man who was raised by a single mom. That is, I may have internalized some of the 'women-don't-raise-their-voices-or-get-angry' sort of stuff that women are inundated with. As such, I might have just about as much anger in my life as other men and women, but I may have more guilt about it than men who had fathers around. It's a pretty simple/obvious sort of thing, but I needed somebody else to point it out to me. Secondly, she noted that I seem to be dealing with 'stuff' around the ways in which I am "woman-identified" (her term, and one which got me thinking). And of course these two things are probably related to each other, too.

This is difficult ground for me to cover, emotionally. It touches on so many things central to my identity that it's difficult not getting worked up in various ways about it. for instance, I struggled with a bad temper for a good deal of my early adulthood. And, though I think I've managed to change myself significantly in that regard, it still flares up, however infrequently, resulting in a raised voice, slamming of doors, a lot of guilt and quite a bit of self-hatred. Even though I have 'come a long way', every single time that my temper has gotten away from me in the past 10 years or so (and I can really count them on two hands) causes me unmitigated guilt. And I think I ought to be mitigating that guilt a bit more--giving myself some credit for how far I've come, and--more importantly related to gender--understanding better how some of that guilt comes from being a feminist (-raised-by-a-woman) man living in a sexist/misogynist society. The guilt isn't completely misplaced, of course; going around slamming doors is generally to be avoided, and can be in certain contexts, abusive. But I think I need to start recognizing where I heap on blame and guilt because I see that sort of behavoir as so stereotypically masculine. My initial feelings regarding my own temper tantrums are usually: I should know better. And, I should. But the fact that I don't always already know better shouldn't perhaps cause as much strife for me as it does--when guilt gets in the way of improving oneself, then it's not as appropriate.

Avoiding the Default and Masculinity
Which brings me to the notion, expressed very well in a different context by my buddy fraggle_ra, of avoiding the defaults of society. One of the things I'm proud of in my life are the ways in which I've been able to avoid the allure of "being a man". To some extent, at least, I tend to/want to/do stay as aware as I can of my male priviledge; part of being aware of it and rejecting it (to whatever degree) is avoiding falling into some of the roles that society supports only because they are traditional (and, of course, because 'status-quo'='patriarchy'). Some of it's relatively minor: I feel comfortable crying (overly so, perhaps). I like hugging my friends, including the men. Some of it is not so minor: I reject marriage for myself in part because I think marriage as it stands plays to the patriarchy. I don't want monogamy in part because of similar reasons.

It's not an easy sort of thing to do, recognizing and rejecting male roles/priviledge, and I'm not great at it. To add even more complexity to the mix, there are problems with even focusing on what I, as a man have to go through and deal with; in some feminist circles, it is thought to not be a good focal point for anybody, ever; to some, focusing on the negatives outcomes that a sexist society has on men is merely a distraction from addressing the oppression that women go through.

I think I can be good at rooting out male priviledge, but I think the rest of my life will likely be in part an exercise in doing so. The thing is, I think I've downplayed how difficult it can be, and how much emotional energy it takes. I've started recognizing more and more the way men are socialized, and how much I haven't been able to avoid it. Traditional masculinities, inasmuch as they both pervade our society and also are misogynist, are worth recognizing and resisting; but I'm starting to better recognize the places where rejecting traditional masculinities has really negatively shaped my world. Part of this is just dealing with the general fallout from rejecting priviledge--it's to be expected when rejecting traditional masculinity that a man will lose something. In fact, it's sort of required. But I think I've just so much played down how hard it is on me, as well as how strong the pull of the traditional is--even for somebody who is trying all the time to avoid it--that I've dug myself into a little hole as regards ditching the default masculinities.

Creating vs. Avoiding
Part of what I'm getting at is my lack of ability to create a self that isn't just a rejection of what it could be. That is, I could be a white, middle-class male misogynist jerk...in a lot of ways, that's what I'm driven (by cultural norms, at the very least) to be. But rejecting this isn't enough. I have to create a self that has some positive goals--and I'm starting to think that part of that positive creative process will include redefining/recognizing masculinities that I can embrace.

Obviously this is entirely too complex for one post; even just introducing the problems takes way too much brain power for me, partly because of how emotional it can be. I'll be touching on this again and again, I imagine.

Filed under:Feminism, Masculinities and Therapy

Personal Responsibility
It's always difficult to know what to do when you hear somebody who you consider an ally to your cause using arguments that you would call bullshit on if offered by those in an opposing camp. If this happens in a small circle of friends, no problem, because usually you can point out the possible problem without people thinking you are trying to undermine their point--friends know that you may very well agree with their point and just not like how they got there.

But in larger social and political situations, it's tougher. You might explicitly state that you agree with the conclusion and not with how it was arrived at, but it still might, to some people, undermine the point.

An example is happening over on Feministe right now--in my mind, people are oversimplifying personal responsibility regarding rape in a way that they wouldn't want to oversimplify personal responsibility when it comes to, say, the number of female CEO's of big corporations (pointing to the glass ceiling) or to the skewed number of not-white people caught up in the US justice system (pointing to the racism). I took some time to formulate a position in a comment there--check it out if you're interested, because I think it's an interesting discussion (with or without my comment!).


Filed under:Feminism and Philosophy

The Good, the Bad and the Heteronormative
I'm not much of an activist. I don't go to meetings. I write to my congresspersons, but infrequently. I give just a wee bit of money to planned parenthood (let's face it, I have just a wee bit of money, really). I do try to talk about things political when I can, and I of course bitch/blog about stuff, which I don't think counts for nothing. These things are important. But I have a lot of respect for those people who go one step further, and for those people who go many, many steps further. Sometimes, in trying to piece my life together into something I consider valuable, I definitely let slide what I consider to be part of my larger obligations to the world.

Which is why, when I see a group of people being activists, but doing things in a way that I think is somehow subject to constructive criticism, I always have mixed feelings. Perhaps if I were out in the world doing this stuff more, I would better understand the reasons activists make their decisions, especially the ones with which I disagree. This sort of benefit-of-the-doubt attitude fueled my discussion about the recent NARAL campaign aimed at women of color (but, critics noted, really only aimed a few groups of woc)--there may indeed be reasons, good reasons--even moral reasons--behind the decisions.

And yet, when I first saw the ads created by the Men Can Stop Rape campaign, I had mixed feelings, and then I had mixed feelings as to whether or not to address those mixed feelings.
On the face of it, who could have a problem with a group of people calling themselves Men Can Stop Rape. Seems to me to be a good idea, perhaps even a necessary idea if one really wants to affect how many people (mostly women, but not all women) are raped. As part of their statement of who they are, they note:

MCSR is an outgrowth of D.C. Men Against Rape, a volunteer profeminist collective founded in 1987 by a handful of men seeking to raise their own and the community's consciousness about men's violence against women. In 1997, MCSR incorporated as a nonprofit organization with the goal of carrying forward and expanding on its original mission to increase men's involvement in efforts to end men's violence.

What the heck could be wrong with that?

Well, this is what could be wrong with it: The best intentions are sometimes not enough. Here are some samples of their newest campaign (click on the picture to get a slightly larger version):



My reactions to these ads are complex (perhaps one of the goals of the ads?). The first thing that pops into my head is, "Why do we have to focus on 'strength'?" Why is it that the entire campaign ("Promoting Strength Without Violence") is based on getting men to listen/learn via zeroing in on a perceived masculine trait? I get the whole idea that 'men like to feel strong' and therefore we might expand/change the definition of strength to have more to do with respecting others, with listening (and with, hey! not raping). But I just feel very deeply that it might be better to attack the very notion of why men feel like they need to be strong. If 'strength' wasn't perceived as a masculine trait, then appealing to men by talking about strength wouldn't be an issue--it would simply be an expansion/change in what 'strong' means. But because the conception of strength is tied to masculinity, the ads make a certain kind of sense, if they are trying to appeal to men. But why not just question the very notion that 'being strong' is what men are all about?

Or, perhaps, some sort of 'We are both strong' sort of thing going on would be more appealing to me. The whole idea for me is that men thinking they have to be strong is one of the causes of violence against women--so why use the concept of strength in order to change minds?

The second basic problem is an even more instrinsic problem: If we're targeting men in the ads because we think that men need to take responsibility for rape culture, then we need to focus on what men can do to change that culture: But do we have to do it by reinforcing some of the very gender stereotypes that help create rape culture? What I have in mind here is reinforcing the idea that Men Ask for Sex and then women can say yes or no. All three of the above ads are basically saying, "I asked for sex, but was ok with it when she said no." How about one that points out that she can ask for sex and the guy can then say yes or no? Why begin from the point of reinforcing gender sterotypes that help create the very problem one is trying to avoid?

I do get why: It's something like baby steps. First we get men to recognize that they ought to listen when women say no; then we can get them to realize that women can want sex, too! And then we can get them to recognize that they, as men, can say no...etc. But I have an intuition (unprovable!) that this is the wrong way to go about it, because you'll never get to step two this way--step one will not succeed because it is embracing too many of the causes of the problem (i.e. embracing rape culture by embracing gender stereotypes about who wants sex).

And then, there's the hetero stuff--why are all of these ads aimed at hetero men? Perhaps a conscious decision, picking a target group--but then I'd want to ask: "Why only target that group?" A pessimistic guess would be: Gay men have no place in a campaign about 'Strength'. But again, I'm unsure of the motives.

There are also some weird racial undertones here--though I understand with three posters you couldn't represent all of the combinations of coupledom that can happen racially, the 'white couple' look a little too brother-sister for me.

And yet, there is one of the posters that seems more along the lines of what I would have hoped for:"When I wasn't sure...I asked." That seems like the sentiment in a nutshell that I would want to get across.
Filed under:Feminism

On Blaming, and Being, the Patriarchy, part III
Always more to say on this topic, it seems. Which, of course, means I am in danger of shifting my focus in a way that's not very feminist. Ack. Navigating these concepts is hard.

But I am still heartened that there are others out there thinking about the stuff I'm thinking about. This time I'm looking at Chris Crass' essay, "Going to Places That Scare Me," which contains some good reflections of being a feminist man (various flavors are represented in articles there), as well as great pointers toward constructive action.

One of the things that resonated with me on a personal level was Chris' biographical account of the guilt he feels as a white male:

I remember sitting in an African American women’s history class, one of two white people, one of two men, the other 15 people Black women and I’m the only white man. We were studying slavery, Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching campaign and the systematic raping of enslaved African women by white male slave owners - millions of rapes, sanctioned and protected by law. Simultaneously hundreds of Black men were lynched by white men who claimed to be protecting white women from Black male rapists. I sat there with my head down and I could feel history in my nauseated stomach and in my eyes filling with tears. Who were those white men and how did they feel about themselves? I was scared to look into the faces of the Black women in that room. “While there is mixing of races because of love,” the Professor said, “our people are so many shades of Black because of generation after generation of institutionalized rape.” Who am I and how do I feel about myself?

To me, this conveys the force of the guilt that I can sometimes feel, that I look to overcome to the degree that it inhibits getting stuff done, but which ought not be ignored completely. But Chris' contribution is more than this--he then goes on to explain not only what he's going through/went through, but also some practical ways to do some good, even in the face of the guilt. And he does this, appropriately enough, by asking for help and listening to an activist who is also a woman:

While it’s necessary to get into the hard emotional and psychological issues, there is also an endless supply of conrete steps we can take to challenge male supremacy.

An organizer working on Palestinian Liberation wrote me saying, “some things gender privileged people can do: offer to take notes in meetings, make phone calls, find meeting locations, do childcare, make copies and other less glamorous work. Encourage women and gender oppressed people in the group to take on roles men often dominate (e.g. tactical, mc-ing and event, media spokespeople). Ask specific women if they want to do it and explain why you think they would be good (don’t tokenize). Pay attention to who you listen to and check yourself on power-tripping.”

Turns out, 'check yourself on power-tripping' is just very, very hard, and a constant struggle, really. And another interesting thing about this, I think, is that it's probably literally not possible to do this all by oneself. We have blind spots, and we need people to call us on shit sometimes. Fortunately, this can be done by feminist men as well as women, as I'm starting to discover. And, while I don't expect feminists in general to focus on how difficult it is for feminist men to struggle through this stuff, it is nice to find some other feminist men (at least in the land of the internets) who recognize the struggle as a struggle.
Filed under:Feminism