Introduction by Hilary

I can say, without hesitation, that I have the most fun being a feminist when I’m hanging out with my feminist friends discussing the issues we all care about. So when someone passed along to us an essay about male gender norms, we thought, hey, let’s just sit around and talk about this. We did, and we’ve transcribed (and luckily for you, cut down) that conversation here. If you really want to simulate the experience, pour yourself a glass of wine (or whatever that rum concoction was that Martha drank).

The article we’re responding to is called “What About the Men? Why Our Gender System Sucks for Men, Too.” It’s rather long, but interesting. In case you don’t want to read the whole thing, it’s from an in-progress book by Noah Brand and Ozy Frantz, and in it the authors assert, “We’ve noticed the thousands of ways, big and small, that our current gender system wounds women. Rarely, however, and often only as an afterthought does anyone remark on how the current gender system harms men.” They go on to suggest that the same tools feminists have used to deal with sexism should be applied to the problems caused by male gender norms. Now, on to our conversation!

The feminists: Heather, Hilary, and Martha

Part I: Gender Norms and Feminism

 “Gender norms are, of course, harmful to everyone”

Hilary: I wanted to start with saying that I think we all agree that gender norms are, of course, harmful to everyone. Everyone should be able to grow up into the person that they want to be without feeling that it’s wrong to be themselves. And the fact that that happens to people of both sexes, and of all races, all around the world, is tragic and terrible.

Martha: It reminds me of one of the very first articles I read when I originally got into feminism about how we teach and un-teach children gender norms in schools, and it talks about a children’s book called William’s Doll that specifically aims to deconstruct these gender stereotypes for boys. And so it’s really surprising to me when people say that feminism is about just women, because one of the first things that drew me in was clearly about all gender stereotypes. 

Heather: And I thought that a lot of the things the authors mention as items that don’t get discussed, are discussed a lot in feminist communities, certainly much more than they’re discussed anywhere else. For example, they talk about how men also get raped, and that’s something that you basically only hear talked about in feminist communities, and fairly often, too. So I think the sort of black and white “feminists never discuss men” thing is misleading and I found it off-putting.

Martha: Yeah, I did too.

Part II: The Authors’ Unacknowledged Male Privilege

“They just don’t acknowledge that all of these stereotypes are tied to male privilege”

Hilary: A lot of the stereotypes and examples they give really piss me off—They write that “Many people find it so unthinkable that men might want to have traditionally feminine jobs, such as nurses or teachers, that they tend to promote men out of those jobs into more traditionally masculine positions.” As if you have to accept a promotion? Poor men, they have to be in all the administrative positions of power. Or, how about the sentence: “Except for sex work, the most male dominated jobs are the most dangerous,” (First, that’s a huge “except!” Woah) “from lumber jacks to firefighters to soldiers, men are more likely to be injured at the job.” Well, a huge part of that is that women are habitually barred from those professions. It is incredibly hard for women to enter those areas and not receive scorn and discrimination—just to get those jobs period.

Martha: Both the workplace examples and the binary stereotype examples they give are so closely tied to male privilege, and they just don’t acknowledge that sufficiently. These are all machismo stereotypes, which are very much about power. And they have to address that in a more direct way than simply saying “there are two sides to each stereotype” and acting like the two sides have equal implications.

Heather: Do you guys think these kind of power/privilege dependent stereotypes affect their other arguments?

Martha: Many of the stereotypes they list are used to oppress women and I think that is a problem with their proposed solution. They kind of put it on women, like women need to be the leaders in this fight against male gender stereotypes. If it’s all tied to power, then women can’t fight that. It’s the men who are going to have to fight it from within. I don’t think you can have external women who have been historically oppressed by these norms (and have already been critiquing them) spearhead that fight, because that model is what’s oppressing them. I think their idea that women can say, “oh, hey, guess what male community at large, not all men are super strong” is going to cause backlash.

Part III: Understanding Feminism

“As if all of feminism is merely a matter of gender norms”

Hilary: So they write, “Unfortunately for a long time feminism has been blind in one eye. It has seen half of how sexism damages people, but it hasn’t been able to engage with the other half.” To me, this is the crux of the problem with the article: as if all of feminism is merely a matter of gender norms. I would say that some of feminism deals with restrictive gender norms, but all of the other oppression women experience living in a patriarchal society is not necessarily just tied to those gender norms, and I don’t think that men experience most of those.

Martha: I feel like he didn’t succeed in not diminishing women.

Hilary: They say, “By not liberating men, feminism traps women in a sexist situation that is little if any improvement.” Feminism has done so much. To say that if we don’t do this, we haven’t accomplished anything?

Feminists at work: totally non-threatening.

Part IV: Dealing with Privilege

“It is all of our job to acknowledge and deal with our own privilege on a daily basis”

Heather: I wanted to say that at end they talk about the kyriarchy and how each person has privilege, and I love it.

Martha: I don’t know, I didn’t appreciate when they said that everyone is a little bit privileged. There are a lot of people who are not privileged at all.

Hilary: And some people are super privileged. “Everyone is a little bit privileged” makes it sound like we’re all on the same playing field.

Heather: That’s true. I should be more specific: I like that they talk about confronting privilege as a perpetual individual responsibility. And yet earlier in the article, I think they contradict that by criticizing feminism for not solving all the problems yet, by not being inviting enough or creating a “happy space”  No, feminism isn’t failing because we’re not creating a happy-fucking-space. People aren’t going to suddenly think, “Oh, you’re handing out stickers? Great! I’m a feminist now.” It is everybody’s job to confront privilege in themselves, and nothing that feminists do as a whole is going to make that more appealing.

Hilary: Amen. And if this article was a universal call to all people, saying, “We haven’t paid enough attention to how gender norms hurt everyone. Let’s all do this together.” I would say fuck yes, you know? But it’s not, it’s sort of saying what feminism’s doing is wrong, and it can’t really fix it, but men can’t really fix it, and this all sucks.

Heather: Yeah, I agree.  All the stuff they say about men having it rough and the need to change that, I agree with. But it’s the pulling down what’s already been done and the dismissive attitude toward that work. That’s where I take issue.

Part V: The good and the bad

“This is marketed to appeal to men who aren’t feminists” 

Hilary: This article acts like feminism needs to do something to get men on board, but the fact is, there are already lots of men on board.

Martha: They’re ignoring them. This is marketed to appeal to people who are not feminists.

Hilary: And the people who pick this up are going to be the men who do have that knee-jerk reaction against feminism that they write about. And they’re going to find a home here really easily. If I was a man reading this, and I wasn’t a feminist, which would probably be the case, if I’m like, “oh, a book about men—

Heather: Finally!

Hilary: “Finally! My whole education wasn’t enough.” I would probably think, “Yeah, everyone is privileged, not just me,” and “Yeah, feminists are kind of bitchy!” So, fuck all of that. But that being said, this section we read is just a part of the book. If it can go to a place where it helps men to be true to themselves, and get out of that “act like a man box” a little bit—I don’t think that that justifies the other things—but that is absolutely a great accomplishment, and I would love for men to be able to get to that place.

Heather: That’s the thing; problematic content aside, this is an important dialogue that needs to be held in the public forum.

I have been writing and writing in endless circles, trying to come up with the body image piece I told Hilary and Heather I wanted to write a month ago. For a while, I gave it up entirely, the pressures of the world being too strong. But, of course, I was brought back to this concept, because the conversation about body image sucks. It really, really sucks. It’s one thing when you start out naturally skinny and start losing pounds to a chronic pain disease, and your non-feminist friends tell you you’re lucky. It’s one thing when men tell you that supermodels aren’t sexy because they don’t have breasts, that men want women with large breasts as a result of biological programming, that such and such man (who you may or may not be hooking up with at the time) only likes large-breasted women. It’s one thing how some women have adopted “real women have curves” as a catchphrase, not noticing that they’re effectively saying that women who look like you are not real women, which is fucking offensive. It’s one thing, when all the books about puberty tell your teenage self about the five stages of breast development, to deal with never making it out from stage two into womanhood. It’s one thing when the men you sleep with tell you that you should try to gain weight because you’re too skinny, and when the boyfriend comes along who talks about your “great skinny body” you’ve been sufficiently conditioned to think he’s kind of a freak. It’s one thing when a male colleague asks if you’ve lost weight, why you can’t gain weight, and if your periods are regular. And of course, it’s only natural to look at yourself in the mirror on a bad day and not be able to get past your microscopic breasts and the way your ribs show and your collarbone sticks out, and how the ball and socket joints of your shoulders are so blue and defined.

But it’s another thing, a thing that feels almost like a betrayal, when it turns out that there are important feminists who say the same things, in the same hurtful way. With the non-feminists, you can think “that’s OK,” or at least rationalize it. Non-feminists might not know about how beauty standards can be tools of oppression, etc. etc. etc. And then you read the feminist discussions, and they deal a blow. You look through your intro to women’s studies textbooks, and you find that both of them focus the female beauty standards section heavily, almost exclusively, on anorexia (one of them is saved, barely, by some poetry on the interaction of race and beauty standards). Other parts of the books contain phrases like, “I don’t trust skinny women” and “I don’t shop at stores that cater to anorexic women.” On a major feminist blog you read a post and its comments in which the author makes ridiculous statements about how no celebrities have breasts and claims that women with small breasts should be glad that they have to buy their clothing in the teenagers’ section (because, the author argues, large breasted women can’t find clothing that fits at all).

The authors of these textbooks and the feminist blogger are people creating feminism for a generation of feminists—they seem like people who should be on your side: women, fellow feminists, and, in particular, this fellow feminist blogger injured by the same beauty standard you are. It is, of course, ridiculous to expect these women to be impervious to the cultural and economic forces that restrict and shape us, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to shout: I exist. I’m an adult, I have a job, and I need professional (i.e., not teenager) clothing. And, most of all, being thin does not make me the enemy.  

I want to reassure these women that body issues aren’t a competition, that everyone’s truth is bad enough to share. The problem is that “it’s not a competition” is rendered false by our culture. That the image issues that most women face are bad enough to share is probably correct. But a lot women can’t do it, knowing that telling their truth would bring on a flood of hate from those of us who’ve been conditioned to be jealous of each other’s bodies. Women don’t get to just tell the truth; they have to prove their truth is awful, maybe the worst, as if body image issues are something frivolous, something not worth being talked about unless they’ve brought us to the brink.

I think the most commonly promoted body image narratives all start with anorexia, then travel to a discussion of becoming severely underweight, and end with a miraculous recovery. These stories are extremely important. But, when they become the only story we allow, when we act like the only negative beauty standard is fat stigma and that fat stigma’s only impact is eating disorders, we miss this and this and all of our other stories.

If we’re going to have a beauty standards discussion, we can’t exclude everyone who doesn’t have traditional body issues. If the personal is political, we can’t police women into hiding their issues because they feel like others have it worse. This is damaging on a personal level, because it shuts women up. But it’s damaging on a macro level too, because it diminishes the impact of beauty constructs. If you say that the only damage from American beauty standards is anorexia, that obviously covers some major issues. But if you open it up and talk about how oppressive beauty standards affect almost all women, while at the same time not losing sight of the potential for these standards to bring women to self-violence and color them invisible, it’s a thousand times more powerful. It’s not about reassuring me or nursing anyone’s insecurities. It’s about telling the truth.

-Martha

Friends, I have been trying to write a piece on body image for a while and it is going very poorly. The good news is that I re-read Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self by Alice Walker, cried, and then found a copy of it on the internet for your enjoyment! (Sorry, all I could find is this crappy typed copy for some high school class…better than nothing, though).

-Martha

This afternoon one of my professors asked the class why Uncle Tom particularly dislikes being beaten by other slaves. A white guy in the back responded by saying that it’s “like getting beaten by your mother. It just doesn’t gel well in your psyche.”

Guess what? No one batted an eye.

I wrote it down in my notes, careful not to miss a word, but said nothing.

James B. Lowe as Tom, 1927

Not only was I stupefied, I was also already tired from trying to deal with another discussion topic. Other white guys in the class were going on and on about how Uncle Tom is like Jesus because he’s kind to those who treat him poorly. It made my skin crawl, for some reasons I could name and some I couldn’t. I didn’t want to listen to any white person explain how there is goodness and righteousness in Tom’s subservient devotion to his masters, and I felt ashamed to be there. (I know, I know, Tom helps free other slaves and does not support slavery. But he stays with and prays for and looks after his slave masters, and I so wish Stowe hadn’t written it that way.) I contended that Jesus lived outside of and in defiance of the system while Uncle Tom perpetuates it in many ways. I couldn’t say quite what I wanted quite how I wanted*, and more than anything I wanted to know what the handful of people of color had to say on this point. I was quickly drowned out, and I never got to hear what those quieter voices had to say. 

And I really don’t even know what to do with all of this right now.

On a related note, when we first started the semester our professor asked us how we felt about reading the n-word aloud in class when we went through passages. The first hand up was that same white guy in the back. “I don’t mind it,” he said.

* Uncle Tom clearly derives his method of dealing with his oppressors from Jesus, but there is something innately flawed in a slave feeling as if he must comply and submit because that’s how Jesus did it. It’s a twisted system, all the more disturbing since the whites were the ones hell-bent on the spread of these “Christian values.” If Tom was a real person I would not hold him accountable for any of this. (See Martha on the topic of victim blaming). But Tom is the creation of Harriet Beecher-Stowe. I could quickly get turned upside down and backwards by the subtlties of all this, in proper English major fashion, but I’m rather sick of the whole thing. Thank goodness the next book on the syllabus is Huckleberry Finn. Oh, wait.

–Hilary

“One of the ways White supremacy and sexism works is through a putative disavowal of emotion as a legitimate form for expressing thought. Women and Black people are overly emotional, so the conventional wisdom goes. We have been taught to overcompensate for this stereotype by being overly composed, even when anger is warranted. And we are wholly unprepared when our emotions start to split the seams of our tightly put on public selves. Perhaps it’s time to change clothes, and intentionally put on something that gives us room to breathe.”

–One of the wise women over at the CFC, on the epic Melissa Harris-Perry

Dear friends of Fuddled Feminists, this is a piece of what we’re doing here. We talk about our emotions, and we’re not going to apologize for either our talking or our emotions. We just didn’t know how to say it as well as the CFC just did. 

–Martha