Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Monica Potts of TAPPED nails the right policy solutions for an otherwise typically, sullen, stupid MRA policy initiative — “financial abortions” for men who don’t want to be responsible parents if their partners become pregnant.

This seems like the wrong solution to a very real problem for low-income fathers. It assumes men should be able to decide not to be fathers but that they can’t do anything to prevent it, i.e., using birth control regularly. That’s an argument for male contraception — a male pill, but also an argument for making condoms increasingly pervasive and expanding access to sex education. It’s also an argument for helping low-income fathers provide the financial support they’re required to by assisting them with services that would help move them out of poverty, or make poverty less devastating.

She said it here.

The problem for men is real enough. Aside from condoms, vasectomies, and not having fluid-exchanging sex there really isn’t much heterosexual men can do to avoid unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. And one result of that seems to be a sort of passive-aggressive resentment that meshes all too well with the traditional view that everything related to pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting is womens’ responsibility. Which is why I like Potts’ take so much.

Aside: This isn’t the main point but she mentioned it first: Potts is right that men really do need more contraception options. For all the whining about men’s irresponsibility for fertility I remain seriously confident that if men had additional options that fell between the permanence and convenience curves of condoms and surgery they’d stop being so passive-aggressive about it and stop being so blazé at other men’s learned-helplessness about it. But that’s not what this post is about. But I digress…

What’s even more important, and even less broadly recognized than the limits on male contraception, is Potts’s point that low-income fathers, as well as pending and potential ones, need financial assistance as well!

I don’t know how many of you have studied the history of welfare or financial assistance but one of the reasons it’s been historically so draconian for women has been a social construction that mandates men as providers. In the 19th Century aid societies initiated the practice of surprise and midnight “bed checks” of women with dependent children to insure they really were widowed or abandoned. The idea that an able-bodied man, no matter how destitute and no matter how unemployed, might benefit directly from charity was anathema. As was the perhaps even more shameful and/or “immoral” prospect of his wife and children receiving food or shelter that he “should” have been able to provide.

And who knows, maybe you could make a case that it made sense back when women could only earn 7 cents for every dollar of equal work men could earn rather than 77 cents today. But income parity really is converging especially in the low-wage/low-income environments we’re talking about, it makes less and less sense to do so now that the “breadwinner”/“homemaker” dichotomy is even more mythical than it once was.

Anyway the whole notion of a “financial divorce” from child-rearing is such a psychotically gendered notion in the first place! Current biases against preparing low-income men for possible single and/or unmarried-to-the-mother parenthood are also similarly gender biased. And in both types of bias not only do men remain alienated from their own progeny, and not only do they maintain assumptions about mothers as “nurturing” and fathers as either supporters or abandoners, they also rather perpetuate policies that are intentionally (“financial abortion”) or unintentionally punitive against women and children.

Although they’re from a couple of months ago these are probably the best paragraphs I read that week. They’re from Megan Carpentier of Jezebel on how she stopped calling herself a feminist and how she started again. I think it gets to the heart of why so, so many people (mostly but not always women) say “I’m not a feminist but…”

The professor was, apparently, a pro-life and pro-choice feminist, who believed that abortion was a moral wrong outweighed only by the moral wrong of sexism. And, once sexism had been conquered, the world would be perfect and abortion would no longer be necessary.

I thought she was cracked, but I was 19 and didn’t realize that “feminism” meant many different things to many different people, or that there was more than one way to be a feminist. Having been raised in a religious environment in which we were taught that there was one gospel, one Church and one way of looking at a set of issues, it didn’t occur to me that a political and social movement would or could be more multifaceted. I figured if she was a feminist, and feminists believed that about abortion, then I was obviously not a feminist.

But the March for Women’s Lives made me realize, very concretely, that there was more to it than what I’d been told: more people, more ideas, more ways of looking at the issues, more ideas of what was or was not a feminist issue. And I came back to the idea of calling myself a feminist, and what that meant, and the kinds of ideas, attitudes, disagreements and fights that the movement could both be and embrace.

Read the quote in context here.

I think this is a great example of the “I Can’t Be A Feminist Because Feminists Believe X” trope precisely because it is so rare to find dyed-in-the-wool feminists who also believe abortion should (at least eventually) be illegal. It sure beats the more common misconceptions that one somehow can’t be a feminist if, for instance, one wears lipstick or shaves one’s armpits or otherwise misses some item on an imagined mile-long checklist of requirements.

Since I still hear someone say they’re not a feminist because of this or that at least a couple of times a year I’d like to propose a good checklist item of my own: If you’ve ever felt compelled to say “I’m not a feminist but,” chances are very, very good that you actually are.

Since I’ve been talking a lot lately about the effects and influences of gender bias, gender assumptions and patriarchy on men I thought I ought to mention a large, and previously understated premise: Patriarchy isn’t zero sum, it’s negative sum. Similarly, and contrary to an astonishing percentage of non- and anti-feminists, feminism isn’t zero sum, it’s positive sum.

I think you’d have to be insane to claim (as, say, MRAs, Heather MacDonald, and Laura Sessions Stepp sometimes do) that men are ever anything like as oppressed by patriarchy than women.

But you’d have to keep a pretty narrow focus to consistently assert that patriarchy is a net gain for men either.

And before you stop me right there let me stop you right there and say that because patriarchy isn’t a zero-sum game it’s a huge mistake to play it (as, again MRAs, MacDonald, Stepp, and others do) as an oppression olympics.

A mistake because, as I’ve said, unlike the aforementioned apologists I don’t think there’s any question who’s more oppressed. But a mistake as well because since patriarchy is a negative-sum game there’s more than enough losing-the-game to go around.

On the flip side feminism, even so-called “old school” or “2nd-wave” feminism, is a positive-sum game. It’s unquestionably offers benefits for women but there’s also no question that it benefits men as well. And not beneficial in the sense that if we (meaning especially men) stop dragging ourselves and other people down we get to some kind of tepid zero. Instead I mean beneficial in the sense that when the dragging stops entirely new opportunities are going to start popping up.

The most significant self-oppression for men, by the way, is that “for us men this is as good as it gets.” It happens to be a lie, of course. And, worse, it happens to be a lie men tell themselves. And, worse than that, it’s a lie men are… pretty aware is a lie.

The trick I’m working on is to look for ways to entice men to reconsider the lie. One way to do that is to try and articulate where it’s a lie. Another is to try and point out to some of the immediate opportunities the alternatives to patriarchy present. And since I’m not sure exactly what I’m doing, yet, I’m going to land on my face the way regular readers know I occasionally do. If so I’ll go back and try it again till I get it right. It just feels like the stakes are too important not to.

I’ll just say that the women (and it’s almost exclusively women) who are making the arguments in the main post and in comments at Generation Cedar in favor of the proposition are not being illogical, irrational, or stupid for saying that a (not the only but a) reason women should try and stay pregnant is (I’m not making this up) to show the community that they and their partners have an active, non-dysfunctional sex life.

I happen to think the premises upon which they base their lines of reasoning are batshit insane with the result that their conclusions bring more harm than necessary on themselves and others. So I’m not saying I agree with them. Nor am I even saying “well, takes all kind to make the world” either. And in fact to the extent they argue or agitate that their choices should be imposed on all women (and by extension imposed on their partners and anyone else needed to take up the slack they drop by being perpetually pregnant) I’d oppose them… vigorously.

But there’s a tendency (around the world) to think people who do something you really, deeply, and based on evidence, believe is a mistake are deluded, enthralled, diminished, or coerced otherwise safe to dismiss as second-class or second-rate human beings. It’s pretty clear these are first-class and first-rate human beings who either have, or would have done well in college, grad school, or business.

They’re not stupid, or ignorant, they’re just really, really wrong.

They’re not even wrong about everything! They’re being a little (ok, a lot) dogmatic about the whole women should be fruitful and multiply thing, but no more dogmatic than other people can get about the overarching importance of women of not having any children at all.

And they’re certainly not wrong about the whole lower-case “it takes a village” importance of recognizing that community implies mutual responsibility and obligation as well as mutual support.

On the other hand I sure don’t see how even if they accept Paul’s (local, tactical) admonitions in his letters that wives should be to their husbands as their husbands are to God as some kind of claim that it’s a sin for women, or men, to decline sex when they don’t feel like it… or simply because their partner demands it.

And, whoo boy, I seriously don’t see where they get the idea that frequent and visible pregnancy, or not, is a more discreet way to signal ongoing sexual compatibility… or at least activity… to one’s community than, say, verbally checking in with friends, family, and confidants from time to time.

I mean, sure, if you add those last two bits as axioms for your value system then a lot of their conclusions start to follow a little more logically. Though since, despite a very conservative and Biblically-minded childhood, I don’t see the basis for those axioms in faith I’d strongly, strongly advise adherents to discard them.

And I suppose if you add a further axiom that for those so inclined, physically gifted, who can find the financial backing, competitive childbearing wreaks no more (but no less) havoc on one’s body or lifestyle than many other physically intense athletic disciplines such as career-professional ballet, track, power lifting or bodybuilding, etc. We just don’t see, say, Billy Jean King, Michael Jordan, Pikaboo Street, or Brett Favre recommending that all children be not only encouraged but required to dedicate their lives to athletics. Nor do they regard any other pursuit as sinful. Nor do they claim that everyone is physically capable of doing so. Nor do they claim that everyone should be pressured to succeed or die trying. Nor do they insist, at all, at all, that people should be forbidden a choice to participate. The women in the post aren’t willing to make those accommodations to themselves or to others.

But even that doesn’t make them stupid. It just makes them intense, uncompromising, driven, passionate, committed, fierce, gonzo, brave, adventurous, dedicated, persevering, rational in the application of their first principles, and a whole bunch of other words and phrases that have been historically used admiringly about men… if not so much, or so admiringly, about women.

Finally, all the above is not a random exercise in “gee, everything is just empowerment isn’t it?” I’m not saying it to somehow celebrate or admire what women can accomplish even when I disagree with them. Nor, as I mentioned earlier, is it a bunch of “takes all kinds to make the world” cultural relativism. Instead it’s to point out that because the proponents are intelligent and motivated rather than intimidated or enthralled to their husbands or ministers the task of persuading them to back off advocating their model as an obligation to be jammed down all out throats is more daunting than we tend to wish… or wish to imagine.