Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Hugo Schwyzer, a proud father and a committed feminist calls out a particularly vicious principle of antifeminism: that men are actually weak, sniveling, useless, worthless bags of dirt for whom, as Hugo nicely summarizes it, “male responsibility is contingent on female vulnerability.”

In the strange math of social conservatives, it’s all a zero-sum game: the greater the freedom of women to divorce, exercise reproductive sovereignty, and earn money outside the home, the less self-worth their male partners will invariably feel.

... Only when women defer to men, submit to men, allow men to take the proverbial reins — only then will men “feel” valued, feel needed. According to this tired bit of wisdom, men get confused and alienated when they are denied the opportunity to shoehorn themselves into a traditional masculine role. The notion that gender identity is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, the notion that men and women can possess different plumbing but the same skill set — all this is too much for the be-penised to grasp. Fathers have abandoned their families, the lie goes, because they no longer feel needed or valued as men.

Read the quote in context here.

Sweet mother of pearl! And these are the folks who say feminists hate men!

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a two way street. The whole “Second Shift” phenomena suggests that many women, no matter how productive their work or how high their financial contribution, feel valued or needed as women only to the extent they also cook or clean or nurture when they “finally” get home. We all need to deal with that, but at the moment I want to deal with this.

Listen gang, if men are abandoning their families because they’re feeling “unneeded” they’re men who… sorry… have already abandoned their families the “traditional conservative” way by… working outside the home, by staying out late with friend or overtime, by abdicating domestic responsibility, by – in other words – already providing no more than they would with post-divorce “visiting rights.” Because there’s a heck of a difference between “bringing home the bacon” and “dropping the bacon off before heading back out again.” And there’s a heck of a lot more to fathering than ballgame, park excursions, and being the “wait till your father gets home” backup in an otherwise completely autonomous household.

You want to feel needed? You be there at o-dark o’clock when the baby needs changing. You be there, same time, a few years later when she or he or they are feverish, or restless, or fearful. You be there, and I mean right there with no video or camera between your face and them, when they take their first steps. You be there feeding them and talking baby talk to them. You be the one with spoonful after spoonful (after spoonful!) of strained carrots or rehydrated rice pablum saying “say ‘aah’ for Daddy” and smiling and giggling and engaging with them. And you know what? You do that and you wanna know what? Their first word is going to be “da-da.” And when they’re said they’ll call for Daddy. And when it’s bedtime they’ll want Daddy to read to them, or snuggle them. And later when you and your partner take them to daycare they’ll ask their teachers very hopefully, and equally happily, whether it’ll be mommy or daddy who’s going to pick them up today. And they’ll do that not because they’re scared of you. Not because you’re “the man of the house” Not because Mommy approves or told them they should “respect” you. But because you were there. And they won’t just want you, they’ll need you, like nobody’s ever needed you before and like nobody else ever will.

And how do you then balance that with the friends and work and outside interests you think you’re going to have to give up to have it all? The same way everybody should be able to, Samson: you share work and home life, you share parenting and partying, you share the cribs and the cabinets and the clubs with your partner, not your property!

Antifeminists are assholes. Stay as far away from those assholes as you can humanly get. You want to be a real man? A needed, and necessary, and wanted man at home, at work, and in bed? Pull your weight. Share the weight. Don’t just love your partner and home and family, don’t just be there for them — be there with them. You want that for yourself, and your family, and if you’re not a man then for the men in your life.

Summary: Reflections on a pointed question from a website that’s usually not on the forefront of feminist activism.

Angry Mouse, in a toweringly angry post at Daily Kos asks a question that, post Bart Stupak and Ben Nelson, keeps gaining traction: Compared to the (literally!) lunatic fringe teabaggers W exactly TF do NOW and NARAL and Emily’s List actually do anyway?

You know those emails? The ones from NOW and NARAL and Emily’s List that declare, with great urgency and lots of ALL CAPS and exclamation marks, that you must give money right now? Stop this bill! Block this nominee! Protect Roe! Save the Supreme Court! And give, give, give!!!

And since you often agree — why yes, I do want to stop this bill; why no, I do not want that nominee confirmed — you click and give. It won’t stop this bill or block that nominee, but you will get another email at the next crisis.

And it’s always a crisis. Even under a Democratic president, with a Democratic supermajority in Congress, the nation’s biggest feminist organizations are in crisis mode, raising money but unable to deliver results. They’re just as effective as they were under Bush. Which is to say, Not. At. All.

...

Remember way back in the fall of 2008, when one clever person decided to donate to Planned Parenthood in “honor” of Sarah Palin?

“Make a donation to Planned Parenthood,” the anonymous e-mail message urged. “Of any amount. In Sarah Palin’s name.”

The message, which began circulating widely on the Internet last week, had one more instruction: request that the personalized thank-you card from Planned Parenthood be sent to Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee and a vocal opponent of abortion, at the McCain-Palin campaign headquarters in Virginia.

So far, the scheme seems to be getting a strong response. As of Friday, Planned Parenthood had taken in $802,678 in donations from 31,313 people, said a spokesman for the organization, Tait Sye. More than two-thirds of the individuals are first-time donors to Planned Parenthood, Mr. Sye said, and money came in from all 50 states.

Nearly a million dollars raised for women’s health care, not by any of these organizations asking for money, but by one anonymous email. If it really is about the bottom line, if feminist advocacy has been reduced to how much money can be raised, what purpose do these organizations serve that can’t be achieved by one person with a good idea and dial-up?

Perhaps it is time for women to examine whether the largest organizations that claim to represent them are really delivering on their promises.

They’ve failed to organize the millions of supporters they have into a coherent and powerful movement. ‘Cause when your movement looks like an amateur mess compared with the “keep your government hands off my Medicare” teabaggers, you’re doing something wrong.

There’s quite a bit more here.

Angry Mouse is absolutely clear the problem isn’t feminism itself. Witness her endorsement of the Planned-Parent letter and its awesome grass-roots response. Which got a lot of acceleration from non-institutional feminist and progressive blogs and websites. (I first heard about it on either Feministing or Feministe.)

It’s also possible those organizations launch tons of initiatives that… um… just aren’t very visible, exciting, base-mobilizing, or particularly cost-effective compared to their high-visibility, highly exciting (or at least stress-elevating), highly-effective but clearly not-at-all base-rallying fundraising.

Just for the record I don’t want to hear that the deck is stacked against women in politics. Or even that the “establishment” welds the whip. Deck-stacking has not hampered Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann, for instance, both of whom are doing even though both are women and cordially despised by a conservative establishment that would very much prefer nice well-heeled white men like Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty. That these women’s most enthusiastic support comes not from the establishment but from the very demographics that, say, NOW says is most inimical to women: MRAs, super-patriots, evangelicals, secessionists, xenophobes, skinheads, and all-round knuckle-draggers. Also for the record I don’t want to hear yeah-buts about how Palin, or Bachmann, or Liz Cheney, or Michelle Malkin, or Kellyanne Conway, or Mary K. Ham, or Virginia Foxx, or (going back a generation or two) Margaret Thatcher, Ayn Rand, Phyllis Schlaffley, Jeane Kirkpatrick, or (before her welcome but peculiar turnaround) Arianna Huffington, and on and on and on were or are just parroting, mimicking, or sock-puppeting for behind-the-scenes male power brokers. Each one of them believes that shit way more passionately than any 10 John Boehners, Mitch McConnells, or Rupert Murdochs.

And finally, from my childhood encounters with conservative protestantism it’s very often women in churches who let their ministers know when they seem to be going soft on hard-line issues. The point is that if there’s a problem for feminists it’s probably got surprisingly little to do with the fact that women are advancing the issues and way more to do with the issues. And this is why, I think, it’s a mistaken strategy in… I dunno… industrial feminist organizations to imagine that “if you fundraise for it they will come.” And why I think it’s absolutely catastrophic to wait till the bus you’re being thrown has too much momentum to be stopped before saying anything about it. You’ve got to sell it. Promote it. In advance. Sell it to women, far too many of whom are on the bus! Even sell it to men! Who are served by the status quo better than women but only relatively so and only scarcely so. (On this point: if men were that much better served then you’d expect to see neither Mary Matlin advancing the status quo nor me feeling confined by it. Instead you see similar dynamics all over the place.)

Going back to Angry Mouse’s point about the Planned Parenthood fundraiser. One email, multiplied by a thousand forwards, reposts, and retweets turned into a million dollars in donations to an organization that, however perfectly or imperfectly, actually does something. That’s a lot of pent-up interest that in turn suggests there’s room for advocacy and action.

I mean… it’s… I mean… doesn’t it says something right there that Angry Mouse’s angry thesis appeared on the only-vaguely-sorta-gets-women’s-stuff DailyKOS rather than something like, oh, say, the organization-ought-to-be-its-core-mission National Organization for Women?

I feel really, really on thin ice saying this at all but it seems like two of the possible alternatives moving forward would be for, say, some serious reinvigoration of the aforementioned groups under the leadership of new generations of unapologetically feminist-activist women like Jessica Valenti or Pam Spaulding or Jill Filipovic… or else the establishment of additional organizations that might actually do something about the adverse gender climate instead of just complain about it.

Update: I should mention, as Angry Mouse does, that Stephanie Schriock, a Gen Xer, former Deaniac, and progressive political-organizing powerhouse, has just become the new president of Emily’s List. If she’s a feminist activist as well as a political pro that could be a promising development.

Wow. So I’ve been bumping into more and more MRA/Pickup-Artist/anti-feminist bloggers with sites named stuff like “Misandry Review” and “Rebuking Feminism.” All I can say is they see the world really, really differently from me.

What’s particularly funny, or would be if it wasn’t so breathtakingly tragic, is that for all their anger and, often, anguish they go to enormous lengths to uphold the paradigm that with their own words, over and over, is crushing them.

One guy, who seemed to think I had to be a woman because I was boosting feminism, was doing this weird self-defeating gloating at the fact that the more equality “us” women got the fewer partners we were going to get. Because, if I understood him correctly, a 2003 paper he cited on what I call the “Maureen Dowd effect” proves that well-educated, successful women can’t find partners “better” than them and so… they don’t find partners at all.

The paper, Education and Hypergamy, and the “Success Gap” (pdf) by University of Washington economics Prof. Elaina Rose, does mention the effect, and cites Maureen Dowd in particular…

But nowhere in the paper does Rose say women want it that way. One particularly chilling reference in her paper:

[A]nthropologist Barbara Miller [1981] studied areas of rural north India and found that strong pressures for hypergamy implied a lack of
suitable husbands for high caste girls. This created a disequilibrium that was resolved through female infanticide.

Which sort of leaves you wondering why these guys are angry at women and not, say, the parents who think so little of their own daughters they’ll murder them to boost the resale value of those who survive. Because wow, it ain’t feminism that supports that.

On a far cheerier note, Rose points out that the tendency for women to practice “hypergamy” (defined as “the tendency for women to marry up with respect to education or other characteristics associated with economic well-being”) isn’t as immutable as… MRAs, sociobiologists, pickup-artists, and other anti-feminists seem to think it is.

[E]conomic theory can explain hypergamy as the outcome of a model of specialization and exchange of the traditional form – i.e.,
one in which men specialize in the labor market and women specialize in home production. Gains from marriage will be greater for couples who are hypergamous with respect to labor market productivity, or characteristics associated with productivity.

...

[F]indings in a number of recent papers suggest that the role of specialization and exchange in marriage has declined. As the source of gains from marriage shifts from specialization and exchange to production and consumption of public goods, hypergamy, and the associated success gap, would be expected to decline. Moreover, transformation of social norms from those that encourage hypergamy towards those favoring more symmetric matchings will tend to reduce hypergamy, and the success gap, as well.⁵

⁵ Goldstein and Kenney report that women with college education are more relatively more likely to be married in 1980 than in 1960.

In other words what Rose is saying is that yeah, when the entire economic system is geared to keep women economically and socially dependent on men women tend to try and maximize economic well-being by the only mechanism available to them. But a page later she points out that that system appears that that kind of “marrying for money” diminishes as women become more economically and socially independent. (And, indeed, that marriage rates actually rose as more women completed college!)

And yet these MRA guys are so sure invested in the “marry for money” status quo that crushes them down to the dimensions of wallets that… they’re actively opposed to anything like feminism that might make life better for them, more fair for them, and make them more likely to experience loving relationships with their equals instead of resentment-based relationships with artificially-subordinated human property.

I don’t get it.

In fact, don’t get it? My life is almost the opposite of that whole “women only ‘buy’ up” meme!

For one thing the mythic male/money/seduction thing never really worked for me. I had more sex, more often back when I was an always-hungry, homeless, long-haired, unemployable, usually-needing-a-shower high-school dropout — with a Gomer Pyle hillbilly accent no less — that at any other time in my life. Back then every woman was “high-status” compared to me, but… none of them seemed to mind. Including a statewide “Junior Miss” pageant winner, a diplomat’s daughter, girls from lower, middle, and upper-class families, or girls who were as down and out as me.

You know what they almost all had in common though? (Besides bad taste in men I mean?) They all had the idea that they’d be able to live independently some day and so they generally weren’t as fretful about picking the “wrong” guy who might not turn out to be on the “right” track to support them.

Oh yeah, and since they had ambitions of independence and partnering with the men of their choice instead of driven to choose “walking wallets” out of necessity they weren’t worried so much about their “reputations” and so they tended to be a lot wilder in bed. More experiemental. More up for new stuff. More willing to say what they liked, and more willing to try it again if they did.

Sure, I occasionally was short-term partners with women who seriously joked with each other about marrying someone rich so they could “lie flat on my back drinking Cutty Sark and eating bon-bons for the rest of my life.” And they’re fun in bed too, don’t get me wrong. But they were way more likely to say “I’m not that kind of girl” than “nah, that doesn’t turn me on.”

In other words, while MRAs seem convinced that men are such disagreeable life-forms that women will only hang with them out of freaking, shrieking greed or desperation, but never love, friendship, or pure, unadulterated horniness.

Shrug. If I was a woman, which once again (feels in pants… nope) I’m not, I wouldn’t want to hook up with a guy who felt that way about himself either, and I sure wouldn’t want to hang out with a guy who felt that way about women.

So. What I keep asking myself about those guys is what’s your plan? You can sit there and stew over how you can’t buy your way into a woman’s bed anymore, can’t force your way into a woman’s bed anymore, and aren’t allowed to lie your way into a woman’s bed anymore either. And you can fume and call that femifacism or castrating communism or whatever. Or you can look around and take a look at who’s the bigger threat to your manhood — the women who just want to be treated like people, or whoever the sam hill it was filled your brain with “no sex for you unless you earn it?”

Thing is they could “reprogram” every feminist on the planet and it wouldn’t change their self-imposed misery a single iota. In fact they could moon-rocket every woman on earth and it wouldn’t change a thing. Because it ain’t women creating their misery. And it ain’t feminism that’s increasing it. More than women ever will it’s in their power to open their eyes to who’s really at the source of their (self) oppression.

I hinted at this in a previous post a week ago but it’s worth calling out again. Jill Filipovic of Feministe said

I get that the point of the article is that feminism shouldn’t focus on purity — you can still be a feminist and do things that seem counterintuitive to feminism. I agree! But emphasizing all the stereotypically feminine things that women can do while still calling themselves feminists only seems to lend credence to the idea that the stereoptical feminist — who is “masculine” and queer and mouthy and not conventionally attractive — is not the kind of woman we want to be. And that’s a problem.

She said it here.

You probably don’t need to follow the link to figure out the context. It’s a great reply to the general problem of “I’m not a feminist but…”

Lately I’ve been trying to more directly engage with MRA- and other anti-feminist attitudes in other on the web and in the world and I gotta say that wall to wall it’s like the “No True Scotsman” fallacy out there.

What’s weird is a lot (though definitely not all) of those guys are willing to agree with a lot of in-all-but-name feminist principles, from anti-sexism, to anti-rape, to equal pay, to respect for decisions, to acknowledgment of the right to choice. And yet… they’ll end up, over and over, saying “but Teh Real Feminists are men-hating menaces.”

So it’s not making the job of engagement any easier when effectively the same sentiment shows up on our side too.