No, I'm not talking about the TV show. (Except I am, sorta.)
I'm talking about (and to) men who are mad. Mad like Howard Beale was mad. Mad at (or about) women. Women who talk about women-stuff. And women who talk about men. Also, too, women who don't talk about men. In short, I'm addressing men who get mad, indignant, or defensive when women sometimes presume to speak as women. Women who claim authority to speak as members of a particular social group.
After the squiggle, I propose that you -- man who gets mad when women speak about women, or speak about men, or don't speak about men -- you can learn something from your anger. I mean that. And women -- by making you impatient, arousing your indignation or making you squirm -- women can teach you something.
Socrates (the Greek dude) compared himself to a "gadfly" that "stung" his fellow citizens into thinking about things they didn't want to think about. Nobody likes that. So they yelled at him and said, "Leave us alone!" Socrates said, "I'm not going to leave you alone!" So they convicted him of heresy and corrupting the youth and sentenced him to death. Socrates took it all in stride. But he told them: "You guys are pissed at me [and they were all guys -- only men were citizens] but what you don't realize is that I'm your benefactor. Not only should you not be mad at me -- you should be thanking me!"
Any man who gets mad when women speak as women about women's concerns and interests (which are neither identical to nor in conflict with men's concerns), that man should pause and consider whether his anger isn't misplaced. When we, we men, least want to hear something is perhaps when we most ought to listen.
Michael Kimmel writes books about men. He is a sociologist who has written about the history and formation of masculinity in American society. I've read two of his books, Manhood in America and Angry White Men. In AWM he draws a distinction: The anger of many white men in contemporary America is real, but it is not true. Many men in our society are angry, and those feelings of anger are real. But, says Kimmel, the anger is not "true," i.e., not justified.
HOW MEN ARE (AND ARE NOT) OPPRESSED
For example, when some men angrily claim that, as a result of feminism, men are now being discriminated against, taken for granted, or otherwise victimized, those feelings are real but unjustified. Simply put, women do not have the social power to oppress, subordinate, or discriminate against men. Gender is a power relation. Consult our nation's history and see who has (and has had) the political, economic, legal, and cultural power. And reflect on the following (from Politics of Reality, by Marilyn Frye):
Women are oppressed, as women. Members of certain racial and/or economic groups and classes, both the males and females, are oppressed as members of those races and/or classes. But men are not oppressed as men.
Think about that. A
radical feminist plainly acknowledges that men are oppressed. Men can be oppressed because of economic class, race, sexual orientation, disability. But men are not oppressed
because they are men. Being-a-man is not what causes anyone to be oppressed; a
black man, a
gay man, a
poor man may be oppressed. But they are not oppressed
because they are men. Being-a-man is a source of entitlement: Our anger is taken seriously; our authority is assumed while women's is not; we men can even talk about feminism (hello!) and be taken more seriously than women, who are regularly dismissed for doing so.
In my experience, men often have strong opinions about "feminism" even when they appear never to have read anything written by a feminist. But how can you reject or get angry about something you haven't educated yourself about, especially when that "something" is incredibly diverse? (There are many varieties of feminism.) If you want your opinion to count, especially about something like sexism or racism, educate yourself instead of reflexively clutching at cliches, stereotypes, straw (wo)men and non sequiturs.
SOCIAL (OR GROUP) AND INDIVIDUAL (OR PERSONAL) EXPERIENCE
But "not all men do it!" "I have suffered too -- I have been victimized." That's like a white slave owner telling a black slave in 1830: "Quit complaining! My wife had an affair last year and now we're getting divorced. Things are tough all over!" You may suffer. But unless your suffering is systematic, linked to social institutions and laws, and shared by men as men, it is not oppression, and not remotely "reverse-sexism." We should distinguish between misogyny (which is attitudinal) and patriarchy (which is structural). A man can perpetuate patriarchy (which is systemic and intersubjective) without having hateful feelings or beliefs (subjective attitudes) about women. Consider the following quotations; the first from MLK ("Letter from a Birmingham Jail") and the second from Paolo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed):
[I]t is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but…groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
Much has been said about
privilege, and I'd like to contribute to that discussion. But only a little, because when a word becomes "sexy," as
privilege has, it becomes a "magic word": a word that everyone thinks she or he understands and that therefore gets used promiscuously. For members of historically dominant groups (e.g., Men), privilege is to your social existence as water is to a fish. Privilege encompasses men's experience (
as men); structures and colors social roles, expectations, practices. "A fish doesn't know it's wet," and in patriarchal societies, men rarely understand the ubiquity of their -- of
our -- privilege. It's our natural habitat, the water in which we swim.
A "fish out of water" is awkward; it flounders and suffers. A member of a dominant social group -- a real person, me or you -- deprived of a merely assumed entitlement (respect; authority; paternalistic interference) is like that fish. When so deprived, or when that entitlement is challenged, it hurts. I believe that is what MLK was getting at, at least in part. As an individual, you may be (hopefully you are) morally horrified by rape, all rape; yet as a man, you may still get impatient or irritated when a woman says something that sounds "feministy." ("Get off my back! Not all guys...") When women claim ownership of their own experience, men do lose something -- that's true; something is "threatened" -- but it was something that was never rightfully ours in the first place. When women gain substantive equality and independence, they can stand apart from men and men's projects, from a man's sense of who-he-is. If we men are honest, that itself is threatening.
SO WHAT A PO' BOY TO DO?
For the oppressors…it is always the oppressed (whom they obviously never call “the oppressed” but…“savages”… or “subversives” [or "feminazis" or "pushy feminists"]) who are disaffected, who are “violent”…when they react to the violence of the oppressors.
That's one option. When forced to surrender an undeserved entitlement, or to recognize another's claim to authority and power, it's almost a reflex to vilify the other as immoral, unfair, or dangerous. Every day on DK people document how this strategy is used against members of the LGBT community; persons of color; the poor or members of the working class; and women, also too. But when men get mad, or even itchy, because women claim there is something
distinct about violence against women, something that
distinguishes it from violence suffered by men (which is real but does not target men
because they're men), then the same strategy is used: A member of an oppressed group is accused of wrongdoing, selfishness, etc., because she has the effrontery to call attention to her own mistreatment.
Not cool, fellow brogressives. An alternative (an alternative to accusing the oppressed of being an oppressor) is to listen and to think hard about what you hear. Sometimes we only learn something by de-centering ourselves and giving up something we already believe. If that "something" involves my sense of self, how I view myself as a social and moral agent, it's painful. It is. And that's why, sometimes, people need to shove us, "sting" us, or demand that we try harder to "get it." But you can persecute Socrates (i.e., ladyfolk), or respect him (them) for helping you learn something about yourself. I know that if I were a woman in this society, I'd be pissed. Mad Men, if you're angry at or about women, just imagine how pissed you'd be at men if you were a woman (!).
I'll conclude (abruptly, I know) with a striking passage from The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker:
I have a message for women who feel forced to defend their safety concerns: tell Mr.-I-Know-Everything-About-Danger that he has nothing to contribute to the topic of your personal security. Tell him that your survival instinct is a gift from nature that knows a lot more about your safety than he does. And tell him that nature does not require his approval.
It is understandable that the perspectives of men and women on safety are so different – men and women live in different worlds. I don't remember where I first heard this simple description of one dramatic contrast between the genders, but it is strikingly accurate: At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.