On Feminist Men

Part of the problem with men being part of feminism is that ‘community’ isn’t like it traditionally was used. In most things called ‘communities’, most people know everyone else or it’s run by people who try to be familiar with everyone. Even these days, in small towns, some people will hear about everyone else in town even if you dont’ meet face to face. But communities and movements like feminism- there are people in them that will never ever meet or hear about each other. A privileged person can’t be accepted into a community and have everyone know why and know that it’s because the person’s given signs that they deserve it and aren’t just abusing their privilege and trying to make yet another space all about them.

And a lot of people do abuse that, you get men who claim to be feminists because they think it’ll get them what they want from women or so they can use feminist key-words to attack women who speak against misogyny, you get various privileged people claim to support people they have privilege over so they can take over and get a power trip while getting back-pats from other privileged people.

Whether or not men ‘can’ be feminists, seeing a man who you don’t know claiming to be a feminist is going to be a red flag for a lot of people because of people who do that.

But, really, any man who’s calling himself a feminist really should be aware of his privilege enough to be aware of that and accept it.

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I’ve been pretty harsh this week. I got into a debate with a person in my East Asian Studies (better called “Orientalism 101″) class because he insisted that while it may be “noble” to want to live a simpler lifestyle (Noble Savage anyone?), it prevented progress so can we really let people live the way they want? And we can’t just find a compromise because two opposing viewpoints can never coexist! Someone commented afterwards about my “vehement opinions”, I don’t know what he thought about those opinions. Someone else said it was a good debate (someone who was annoyed at the other guy as well), it wasn’t, it was hell. I was sick through that class because I’m so sick of oppression- of facing it, of being guilty of it, of knowing it exists- and seeing all this government abuse and reading about it and… eurgh.  I didn’t debate because it was fun, I debated because I was in a class mostly made up of rich white americans (and some people from Asia who may not feel safe saying what they think about the whole thing, or may be part of the oppressing group in a given context) and I didn’t want that supremacist bullshit to be seen as a-okay. I think the only way I got thorugh that class was because I had art before, and it actually really does help.

I didn’t get to tell off the person who was talking about how everyone enjoys music and art, which is ablist, so nomads can’t be happy because they don’t have either (WTF?). Blah.

Today at lunch I met a friend of some friends for the first time, who commented on how he “doesn’t believe in feminism”. He was just joking. Only not, because he thinks the really hateful feminists give them all a bad name and it’s true for all women. Eurgh. Tone arguments there, lovely. And there was no comment about how some feminists have been hateful in an incredibly bigoted, oppressive way to women who lack other privileges (white, temporarily able bodied, middle+ class, non-intersex, cis, etc). I will never identify as feminist because of the incredible bigotry involved in it, a lot of them want me dead and too many of those who don’t justify this because “they do such good things for feminism as a whole!” so it doesn’t matter how much damage they do to me and mine. It sounded more like “Those women call me out on my male privilege and I don’t like that”. Boohoo. And when he talked about how all feminists/women are made to look bad by these “hateful” women, with no proof of how this is sexist and busted but proof of why they shouldn’t be like that. And it is sexist, because a vocally hateful group of men doesn’t get all men labeled as hateful like that, there are plenty of loud and hateful men who spout misogyny and people like this guy still talk like women have no right to be hateful. I didn’t respond to this, I left.

I don’t usually call this stuff out. But I don’t have the spoons anymore. That might sound odd- that I “invite” drama because I don’t have spoons. But it tears at me to let this stuff slide. I’m still upset about what happened- but I’m upset that it did happen and it was allowed to happen, not that I was a part of it. I don’t have the spoons to be a good little minority.

I have a friend who’s half-black & half-white, some people read her as hispanic but she can also be read as white as well as black. She seems to be from a low/er class family, but I could be wrong. She talked about how she doesn’t let her bug her, how she doesn’t really care if someone calls her the n-word because she knows she’ll get that in the real world and that’s life. It wouldn’t surprise me if part of that’s because she’s always been that race, always been from that family (to my knowledge), so has had more time to deal with it, time to build up defenses with the help of her family and those around her. I’ve pretty much been shielded by the privilege of invisibility until about a year ago, not even, and have basically been thrown into this without any safety net, any guaranteed support beyond my partner, anything.

Privilege 101 ish

(I’m not entirely sure I’m qualified to talk about this, but I’ll give it a go.)

Privilege doesn’t often come up around people who have it, and when it does it’s generally knocked down with privilege denying and people not bothering to find out what the terms mean before getting offended by it. If you start looking into people who talk about privilege, then you’ll probably see words like “supremacist” and “oppressed” that push quite a few buttons and make people want to deny. But most of the words aren’t quite as harsh as the kyriarchy wants you to believe. So, what is privilege?

First, you have to know that there are groups who are privileged by society and groups who are marginalized by it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that there are laws in place that support or even allow this to happen, but the way society is set up it does anyways. One example is that heterosexual people are privileged over people with any other sexual orientation. Even if all the laws were made so that you can’t fire or otherwise discriminate against someone for not being straight; if most relationships in the media are straight couples/only portray other sexualities as tokens and not people in their own right, straight people would still have privilege because their sexuality would still be treated as more normal and natural and acceptable. No one has to say anything against other sexualities, but subtle othering still makes it clear which one society feels is right. People who are privileged by society have privilege.

Internalized

Society is cis supremacist. Whether we realize it or not, we’re fed a lot of transphobia and cissexism from a very young age. Hell, look at the cards and such available to buy someone who just had a baby. There is no “Congratulations, it’s a baby!” in yellow or green or purple. Just “It’s a boy!” in blue and only blue and “It’s a girl!” in pink and only pink. Seconds old and we’re already being told exactly what people think we are and exactly what that means to society. The idea that someone who looks like a cis man is a man and someone who looks like a cis woman is a woman is found in pretty much all picture books, TV shows, everything. Toys are awful, too. In catalogues and on boxes, amabs play with boy toys, afabs play with girl toys, and a trip down the toy aisles’ll tell you what messages the toys send about the binary genders.

How we use language is also pretty cissexist and even interphobic. I’m currently watching mythbusters, which is trying to determine whether men or women have a better pain tolerance*. What they probably mean is something like whether people assigned male vs female at birth, people who are capable of giving birth vs those who aren’t, people with functional ovaries vs functional testes, any number of different things that do not mean the same thing. But we use them as if they’re interchangeable. Even trans people can. I often see trans people saying fe/male-bodied as if the cissexist idea of bodies is universally accepted even by trans people.

LGB(?)Q

This school has a cLGBQ center. Sorry, it has a “LGBTQ” center. They did a presentation about gays, sorry, gays and lesbians, no wait- LGBTQ people. (the white cis lesbian speaker used the 3 interchangeably) The ‘Q’ stands for people questioning their sexual orientation, if you didn’t know. And Queer. With talk about marriage equality including lovely quotes about how if there isn’t equality for all there isn’t equality at all (marriage “equality” doesn’t benefit the polyamorous, those with chosen families, lower class people who would lose coverage if they got married, etc). A shout out about how trans people have trouble deciding which restroom to use that, quite frankly, applies to anyone with non-normative gender presentation in the wrong parts of the world and didn’t really present trans people well to cis people well at all. I don’t think I’d have any idea what a trans person was after seeing a bunch of androgynous people talking about not knowing which restroom to use. And a talk about how feminism should be in the LGB(t)Q. (Genderbitch has a lot on whythat might not be a good idea*)

There are also LGBTQ mentors that are there to help people deal with the issues and coming out and all that other stuff. Unfortunately, we don’t meet our mentors until AFTER classes start. Maybe that works for the cLGBQ, I don’t know, but for trans people- it is vital to work this stuff out first, especially if you don’t pass and can’t just go stealth. The sooner you tell someone, the less time they have to think of you as who you aren’t and more time to think of you as who you are. A mentor after the damage has been done is nowhere near as useful as one beforehand.

It seems like an awesome resource for the cLGB- it really does. The presentation was good for them, the mentors are probably good as well. And it’s done good for trans people in the past, but the current person in charge has said that she doesn’t have much experience with trans people. So I don’t know how useful it’s really going to be to me.