Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Ann Friedman of TAPPED tackles yet another troubled essay by Hanna Rosin appearing, this time, in a cover(!!!) story for The Atlantic. Friedman nails Rosin’s problem here (emphasis mine)

It’s disappointing that, despite a history of sharp observations about gender and 5,000 words to work with, Rosin makes the same oversight as all of the other hand-wringing articles about the state of the American male. She thinks the problem is men; really, it’s traditional gender stereotypes. The narrow, toxic definition of masculinity perpetuated by Rosin and others — that men are brawn not brains, doers not feelers, earners not nurturers — is actually to blame for the crisis.

Unlike some other chroniclers of the so-called decline of masculinity, Rosin acknowledges men are not biologically predisposed to jobs that require strength and aggression, just as women are not biologically destined to be better thinkers and caregivers. Yet her underlying assumption is that the growth industries we currently consider to be “women’s work” (nursing, home health care, food service, child care) will always retain that designation. Maybe it’s just my feminist idealism talking, but I fail to see why these “nurturing professions,” as Rosin dubs them, must forever be the province of women. Not once does she posit what would happen if we stopped writing articles that reinforced the stereotype that men are best suited to the manufacturing and finance sectors.

She said it here.

This is another reason, by the way, why I feel so strongly that feminism benefits men. In practice freeing ourselves by “challenging traditional gender roles” has, well, traditionally meant freeing women by challenging their roles. Since I think it’s fair to say women have been held further under water it made sense that that would be a priority. But for such challenges to be complete it’s also really critical to challenge the gender roles that hold men under water as well. Rosin, rather startlingly, continues to soak herself in the notion that the constraints of women’s roles were artificial but that the constraint on men are somehow real.

On the one hand you maybe can’t blame her — it’s a very widely held misunderstanding. And one that really wouldn’t have been obvious to someone who’s framework dated back to mainstream feminism of the 1970s. On the other hand… as Friedman says it’s not like Rosin’s a newbie when it comes to grappling with gender stereotypes. I’m going to blame it on the deep, abiding, and very difficult to overcome notion that men are the “reference normal” against which anyone else must be a variation. In this case it’s showing up in the form of compared to the standard-male baseline everyone else is making progress.

If you instead start looking at men not as a baseline but as just one more demographic all sorts of new questions, and answers, and challenges, and resolutions become possible.

Via Jessica Valenti’s tweet.

So speaking of feminism and men, y’know how in my pet theory of the dominant paradigm women are imagined to be a “no-sex” class, meaning they have no intrinsic sexual agency of their own and consequently their sexuality can be impounded and used by themselves, sure, but also by their custodial men as a form of currency for transactions with other men? And how the flip side of that is that men are the sex class, so single-mindedly… even no mindedly obliged to reflexively, animalistically, and irresistibly sexual that they “wake up so horny the crack of dawn ‘better watch out?”

It seems to me that if you’re sold on that view of men then homophobia is a twisted but logical outcome. Because if you’re raised to believe that you literally can’t resist sexual temptation of any sort but you’re not actually sexually oriented towards other men the… yeah, it makes sense that you’d be wildly intolerant of gay men. Because if you believe yourself part of the “sex class” then any hint of “temptation” must logically be scrubbed from one’s environment.

And similarly, if one believes men are ravenously, uncontrollably sexually impulsive then one must live in mortal paranoia that not only might one inadvertently receive an… aggressive sexual advance not only from perceptibly “homosexual” men (who are falsely presumed to be sexually interested in any possible opportunity for sex with any possible man) but equally uncontrollable straight men for whom, after all, must also believe “a hole is a hole.”

The notion itself is silly conceit mostly of straight men. Gay men, after all, having actual experience of attraction to other men, as opposed to imaginary fear of such attraction, don’t seem to have much difficulty controlling their sexual impulses at all. Or at least directing their impulses towards other gay men.

And it’s not like men aren’t mightily constrained… not like men don’t constrain themselves!... to avoid being mistaken for gay. And because of the violence and ostracism that goes with homophobia such constraint seems warranted.

And while I’d be the last to lament calls for increased tolerance and understanding of LGBT culture I’m now also one of the first to call for increased understanding of male straightness! Because, seriously, once you get over the idea that all men will impulsively “fuck anything that moves and some things that don’t,” and once you get that just like women men also have sexual agency it just seems like the need for straight tolerance of homosexuality could easily be replaced with recognition of its… I dunno… sexual irrelevance to heterosexual men.

Point being that diminished homophobia would be one more consequence of subverting the dominant sexual paradigm, and a consequence of diminished homophobia would lead to an increase in the range of expressive freedom for men, which is consequently yet another further reason why straight men (and not just men beset with “gay panic”) should be as enthusiastic about the benefits of feminism as anyone else.

Quick followup on re-thinking “unwed” pregnancy in an earlier post.

You know…

Perhaps because we’re such psychos about pregnancy and child-rearing as the “wages of sin” for single women we tend to frame our narratives almost entirely on the consequences on the mothers.

I mean, yeah, sure, in a patriarchal society that’s where all the emphasis would go — all the “who’s your daddy” business, all the “already chewed gum” abstinence analogies, all the “women and dependent infants and children” programs, all the “man around the house” idealizing, all that crap and more are going to be of natural concern if what really matters is determining paternity and avoiding “cuckoldry” and scorning “that kind” of woman and all that.

And I know, I know, in patriarchal society pregnancy and child-rearing and staying home with the kids and all that domestic stuff is “women’s work” about which men should be some combination of aloof, clueless, indifferent to, vaguely “pride and joy” motivated about, and largely absent from.

I know all that and I get that when you factor all that in it makes sense that the focus would be almost entirely on the role of women and children in single parent families.

And I even get… in fact I especially get… that in patriarchy men are considered the default, neutral, standard norm against which women and your uterus thingies and other lady parts are “the other.” And that “the other” is always going to get way more scrutiny and be taken way, way less for granted than the by-definition normal, well, normal men-like people.

But…

But…

Y’know? If you start looking at men not as the standard species type for human beings but just one more of a very wide variety of types you start to stop making assumptions and start asking questions. You stop looking at men as “that which in a just society all others will finally be equal to” and start wondering what their tradeoffs, obstacles, and unexamined oppressions are.

And when you do that you have to start asking yourself…

What is the social and psychic cost to the very considerable number not just of single men who’s absence helps define “single-female head of household” but on those men?

Because, seriously, not being part of a family, of having children but not being connected to posterity, of being defined as independent and free of households while in reality being only secondary to them?

Dudes, they’re missing out on some serious quality of life!

That would be one of the problems of defining one’s self by one’s gender roles instead of by, say, what you could create for yourself.

Because if your a man and your “role” is to be “head” of the house…

But you being on average only an average human being you only having a 50% chance of being the “head” in relationship to any other human being…

And then you multiply that sense of defined entitlement/obligation not only by one’s partner but by another 5O% chance for each additional member who comes into the family. Then the statistical chance that you actually are qualified to be the “head of household” of social expectation to which everyone else naturally and justifiably defers goes down pretty quickly.

Which would be fine, of course, except for that Garrison Keilor-like social expectation that all men must be “above average.” Which turns the statistical necessity that all men must be, well, average into its own no-win cycle of shame, withdrawal, undeserved entitlement, anxiety, anger, and isolation.

The alternative for men to being the Ozzie and Harriet “head” of one’s family, of course, is to just be a plain, old, regular, incredibly, incredibly valuable part of one’s family.

The problem with all the common narratives for men in families is it’s all either/or — either you’re the head of the family or… you can’t even be there at all. (And clue #72 would be: even if you are able to merit the capacity to be “head” of the household it’s… still a really, really good idea, even for meritocrats, to distribute tasks and other primary decisions to those who are most immediate to various situations. Just saying.)

Anyway, this often-unwarranted pressure to be the titular-male “head” of the household is largely not, by the way, mitigated by the expectations of everybody else besides the man — beginning with his partner and extending to her parents, his parents, his and her siblings and other family members, often his friends, his employers, his neighbors, and, for that matter, random people walking down the street.

And if “because I say so” is a really dumb reason to try to be in charge “because everyone else says so” is even worse.

It’s a lot of pressure when you think about it — even if you’re committed to being a part of the household and not just roleplaying the head it’s hard to buck everyone else’s expectations.

Which is just one more place where feminism comes in and “traditional” expectations don’t. Which is kind of ironic when you think of the stereotypical/theoretical antagonism between feminists and unattached single men. But here’s the trick: you relay the last four or five paragraphs to your average feminist and she or he’s going to come to your side very quickly. You try to explain it to your average anti-feminist and he or she will just say you need to grow a pair, or to get off his lawn.

Summary: A very long post about gender, power, agency, and choice, with side trips into my personal history and with a big boost in the middle courtesy of Lindsay Bayerstein.

So the other day on NPR there was one of those “contrarian” segments about some woman who’s written a book about how “feminist” it is to drop out of the economy, stay home, and… well… basically doing what my grandmother did back in the mountains of western North Carolina in the early-to-mid 20th Century: busting her ass from before dawn till after dark raising all the household’s food before cooking it, serving it and washing up after three times a day just like she busted her ass making all the clothes and linens before washing and ironing them and putting them away, and so on while her husband tended the commercial side of their farm and made sales and deliveries.

This woman on NPR (sorry, I didn’t catch her name) said she felt that such work was much more important and much more feminist than what she said was the “feminist ideal” of basically abandoning domesticity in favor of climbing the corporate ladder.

Since neither she, nor her interviewer, nor evidently the editors at NPR didn’t consider (the show not being “All Things Considered,” I guess) was that role this woman’s husband played in the enterprise.

Not to sound “all about the men” or anything but in this case I don’t think it’s possible, at all, to assess whether returning to a “woman’s work is never done” lifestyle is feminist, at all, without understanding what’s going on with their partners: what are their roles in the household? What are their roles in the domestic economy? In the outside economy? In decision-making?

Because, at least from my perspective as a classical radical feminist of the Shulamith Firestone persuasion, what’s essential about gender neutrality, gender parity, or gender equality isn’t whether the woman works inside or outside the home or whether she’s the “breadwinner” or her partner is or even whether they choose to manifest “femininity” or “masculinity.” In a way it’s not which tasks each member of the partnership takes responsibility for, or even the proportions since all individual’s affinity, aptitude, interest, energy, and need varies.

Instead it’s about the intentionality, flexibility, involvement, and relative power inside the relationship and how much room is available for both partners to determine what is done, how often, by whom. And why.

At the highest, most abstract layer of relationship dynamics, if either partner says “I’m going to be doing this therefore you must to do that” it’s not a feminist relationship. That’s no less true if the man says “wife, I’m going to work so you must stay home with the children” than if the woman says “husband, I’m going to stay home and mind the chickens so you must go out and earn all the money.” And, I might add, it’s just as true if instead it’s the man who says “wife, I’m going to stay home and make bread therefore you will go out and bring home the bacon.”

That’s what’s cool for me about Firestone’s radical vision: feminism is about power. Personal power. Relationship power. Social, cultural, and economic power. And it’s about agency: who’s got it, who’s permitted it, and what forces support or restrict it.

That’s obviously not all there is to feminism. Moving away from the high-altitude levels I’m so fond of there are more practical considerations. Which Lindsay Bayerstein of Big Think brings into focus in her own considerations of the same phenomenon:

Today, Echidne of the Snakes addresses another facet of the same trend: “reclaiming“ traditional feminine handicrafts, like knitting, as a feminist statement. Echidne wonders why today’s young women are embracing something that earlier generations regarded as drudgery.

It’s a paradox. Here’s my attempt at a resolution. Liberation has two components: objective and subjective. Objective liberation is about concrete gains in the real world like expanding rights, passing laws, raising wages, expanding opportunities, etc. In order to fully enjoy the fruits of objective liberation, however, members of oppressed groups must also subjectively liberate themselves from the self-hatred and reflexive deference has been drilled into them from birth.

...

Feminists are prone to endless, and fruitless, arguments over whether burlesque or gardening or knitting can ever really be liberating for women, given their historical context. The great thing about a double standard is that you can rebel in either direction! If you like cross-stitch or knitting you choose to interpret these pursuits as a statement about the intrinsic value of discredited “feminine” activities. If you don’t, you can revel in the knowledge that, unlike your great grandmother, you will never have to darn a man’s socks. Or you can rebel by shrugging your shoulders and getting on with the rest of your life. You don’t have to care one way or the other.

She said it here.

Speaking for my own life, and possibly for the author interviewed on NPR, I really enjoy knitting, and cooking and cleaning, and childcare (though I also really enjoy technical conferences, database programming, website development, and adult education.) But because I’m in a pretty pluralistic relationship with my partner, and because at least so far we’ve been able to avoid the necessities of subsistence living, those activities are optional rather than obligatory for me. And if I ever chose to do them all day, every day, it would be a choice… though one negotiated with my partner.

My mom, on the other hand, has worn 100% drip-try polyester clothes since the day it came out, precisely because growing up washing and ironing was her foreordained role in life. As a small child (like my dad she also grew up in western North Carolina) she helped wash clothes in a crank washing machine with a crank wringer because there was no other choice but a washboard, she hung load after load of clothes on the line to dry because there was no other choice, she re-dampened clothes with water sprinkled from a old 7-Up bottle with a patent cork and aluminum sprinkler head and then ironed with real solid-metal irons heated on a stove because there was no other way to iron clothes. And she and her sister did it from childhood because that was the foreordained fate of all women in domestic life no matter what age. And so the instant she could escape from the clutches of “blue Mondays“ she was out of there like static-electricity sparks from nylon sweaters pulled from a drier and fifty or sixty years later she still hasn’t looked back.

That my brother and I, when we were single young men, bought cotton dress shirts and ironed them ourselves instead of just buying permanent-press annoyed and perplexed my mother to no end. The difference, though, was that unlike her conditions growing up we (like so many other baby-boomer men and women) had the agency, the power, and the luxury of time and opportunity for washing and ironing to be a choice instead of a necessity.

So when it comes to questions about whether going back to washing clothes on rocks in a river is or isn’t feminist, or is or isn’t liberating, or instead whether getting off the “mommy track” and striving up the corporate or political ladder is is or isn’t feminist it again comes down to that fundamental question of power, self-determination, luxury of time, and… I’m going to add respect.

Is it your choice (do you have agency to make the choice?) Is the choice a negotiated or mandated part of your relationship with your partner (do you have the power to make that choice?) Will your choice be recognized in the broader context of gender expectations — meaning will it perhaps be submerged, and thus made invisible, inside those expectations, or instead be seen as challenging and thereby expanding the scope of what can be expected for your gender? And finally, as a member of your socio-economic class or era do you have a choice to do it any other way, period, at all?

The reason I think feminism is for everyone, or at least why it’s important to me, is that it opens those avenues, and makes those questions available not just for middle- or upper-class cis-women but for everyone.