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fMhLisa of Feminist Mormon Housewives stands up for feminism and men (I’ve mildly reformatted her post)

So there’s this one debate, you may be familiar with it . . .

One side of this debate says stuff like:

• Feminists hate men.
• Feminists attack men.

• Feminists want to weaken men.

And I hear many of these same people saying:

• Men only think (or care) about one thing.
• Men  don’t have a strong moral compass and need women to (gently) guide them to do the right thing.
• A man’s pride controls him, so don’t bruise it by being bossy.  It’s okay to get your way, just so long as he thinks it’s his idea and feels strong and manly about it.
• Men are visual, they can’t help it, so cover up because he can’t control himself.
• Men are simple creatures who need food, sex, sports, money, and fast cars.  Don’t expect him to have (or express!) a complicated inner life with emotions and crap.
• Men are naturally less righteous than women, so they need this here God-powered crutch gift to raise them up (nearly) to our level.
• Men have to think they’re in charge, or they quit trying. So we’ll just tell’em they preside (even if we really are equal partners), and let’em assign someone to say the prayer.
• You also gotta let men have all the leadership positions, cause otherwise they’ll stay home and watch football.

• If we don’t let men have the priesthood (and make the money, and protect us from spiders ‘n rapists), then women wouldn’t really need men. (Since other than that all they’re good for is sperm donors?)

So wait . . .

Who is it that attacks, weakens, and hates men?

I nicked her whole post from here.

An even better question? Who created the stereotype of men that feminists are supposed to hate so much? Anti-feminists hate, fear, and are strongly disgusted by men. Feminists? Exasperated sometimes, when we men mistake anti-feminist stereotypes for compliments maybe. But hate? Not so much. Certainly not the way anti-feminists hate us.

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.

Julie Bindel, writing in The Guardian has a number of interesting points about a research project she participated in by interviewing men who volunteered and/or otherwise agreed to discuss being customers of prostitutes.

The most interesting point in her article, by far?

One of the most interesting findings was that many believed men would “need” to rape if they could not pay for sex on demand. One told me, “Sometimes you might rape someone: you can go to a prostitute instead.” Another put it like this: “A desperate man who wants sex so bad, he needs sex to be relieved. He might rape.” I concluded from this that it’s not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it’s sometimes men themselves.

She said it here.

One really, seriously cool thing about Bindel’s article? She links to an ungated copy of the research report(pdf)! That’s very cool.

One reason it’s cool is that if you read the report you can see stuff like, oh, say, who the co-authors and sponsors of the study were. And one of whom was the not always exactly correct activist Catharine A. MacKinnon. Which lets you know to pick up a grain of salt while reading.

Skepticism notwithstanding, while there’s a distinct possibility that the quotes were cherry-picked there’s no reason on earth to doubt they found men who actually said those things.

Not least because it’s close to conventional wisdom: lots, and lots, and lots of people believe men are such borderline-criminal, verging-on-rapist, impulse-control-of-a-three-year-old-child animals.

Oddly, as Bindel points out, a demoralizing number of men believe it.

Lest one leap to accuse contemporary feminists for spreading that belief I’ll just point out the idea substantially predates contemporary feminism, which only really cropped up in the late 1960s. Whereas the idea that prostitution prevents rape was already current in the 1360!

Anyway, Bindel’s quotes nicely illustrate that whatever minor problems feminism might have with men it’s usually nothing compared to the abiding misandry of non-feminists and anti-feminists.

(Clue: Of course most men are actually perfectly capable of controlling their urges. Hello! Masturbation?)

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.