(hugely longwinded rambling warning)some salient quotes from my post
why did you take it? why did you take it again and again?(re-reading the above linked post will fill in additional background context for this post - it is not necessary to understand the post, though)"The ladies were always the ones who would get things prepared and make sure the function would happen. The men would stand around talking and being important. Self important. They weren't particularly nice to me. The ladies were. I would hear the ladies complaining about the schnooks they were married to, and how they all went for the glory, while the women did all the work. It was the ladies who trained me in politics. The men provided the intellectual cover and framework, but it was the ladies who actually did the work that got shit done.
I swore I would never be a man like that. I would be the guy who did all the stuff, and who was sensitive to their needs, and helped - participated."
"I was in contact with women who were feminist leaders in Canada and the U.S. I liked them. I liked strong women. I could never stand simpering incompetent girly-girl crap. I still like attractive women, though - I'm not into the frump zone.
I hated it when my parents argued. I swore I would never do that. I would be even tempered and try to be always polite and considerate.
I read Playboy. I read The Erogenous Man. I read article after article about being a sensitive and giving sexual partner. I swore I would be that.
I read all my Mom's women's magazines. I read the articles about how men should really be. About what women really want in a man. I swore I would be that.
I would be the perfect man. Always giving. I am a large white male born to privilege. As I have grown I have developed a deep voice and a commanding and relatively powerful presence. I have guilt about that.
I swore I would never be an instrument of patriarchy. That I would fight to make white patriarchal society more egalitarian."
from
Tattoo (part 2)"By being the anti-asshole I could meet the mark set in women's magazines and books (and in Playboy) for the perfect male. I would be "the man all women desire". Polite, pleasant, considerate, nice - to a fault.
Then women would like me."
from
Tattoo (part 1)"In an interview about her 1981 movie tattoo Maud Adams said "The tattooing in this movie is a metaphor for what happens in a relationship. Except you can see it outside instead of just having the inside of your head tattooed.""
my Mom on why she insisted we learn to cook and perform household duties:
"Because there's no way you're going to be as useless as your father"
my grandmother to my Mom, on household activities, when Mom married Dad:
"I've done the best with him I could... He's in your hands now"
----
I was talking to Smitten a week or so back. We were discussing our perspectives on feminism - on the role it played in the ideological underpinnings and the mood of Hillary Clinton's campaign. This was following some discussions I had been having with my kids on the topic of the Democratic primaries
[later edit](for what it's worth, we're all Obama fans - including Smitten).
[/later edit]I was discussing how mad I was at the kind of attitude I had been running into with a number of women - including my mother - who viewed Hillary's potential success as an extension of their own life battles. That if Hillary won it would be striking a blow for all the shit they had taken in their lives.
I argued that while that might be the case, people who push for women candidates to gain office solely on the grounds that they are women are committing a logical and ideological fallacy. That a woman like Margaret Thatcher, for example, did more to set back women's rights and advancement by her policies than her advancement as an individual did for women. That policies must count as much as gender when looking at women's advancement (just to underline it - I do not believe Hillary is a Margaret Thatcher - that was just an extreme example of a woman leader with non-women friendly policies). In my political party a decade or two back we elected a woman leader nationally - the line used on the convention floor was "It's time for a woman". She was new - a blank slate that people wrote their own projections onto. No history in elected office prior to her election 2 years prior. She was awful. A complete disaster. We subsequently elected a second woman as leader - one who
was competent and rebuilt from the disaster.
"It's time for a woman" doesn't cut it for me - not then - and not now. Gender is not the sole qualifier for anything (I say this as an ardent proponent of equity hiring policies and practices, though).
But all of that is a bit of a tangent to the original point of this post...
As we discussed some of the statements that had been made by Clinton supporters Smitten showed me a paper she had written on the topic of feminism in one of her social psychology classes. She talked about the methodology she used to do the interviews. She talked to her friends - she talked to her friends about their attitudes and whether they were feminists - her definition was something to the effect of: A feminist is someone who believes in equality of opportunity between genders socially, economically, and [something else -
spiritually i think].
(her paper and words were more sophisticated than the above - but this is from memory)
She did a lot of gender role analysis.
She found that neither her, nor her friends and family were quite as liberated as they thought. Even (especially) some of the women who said they were post-feminist - that society had progressed to the point that feminism/women's rights wasn't needed anymore.
Smitten had two agendas - one was to complete her paper, and the other was to subtly propagandise her friends and family into rethinking their gender roles and ideas.
In our discussion one element of her approach stood out. That she was primarily talking about women. About women's actions and self concepts.
I pointed out that it was a pattern for her. That she was tougher on women than on men. I used a couple of examples between her son and daughter. I suggested that part of it was because the men in her life had been pretty useless clods - father (abandoned her), mother's various useless/alcoholic boyfriends, various useless boyfriends Smitten had, and her ex-husband (her husband was less useless from a functional standpoint - just emotionally absent). She said that men were so intimately absent from her life and her knowledge that she wouldn't know where to begin to give men advice about being men... That she knows what women are capable of - but that men are really a mystery.
Still
Her analysis
No man bashing
This was completely new to me.
Most of the feminist analysis I have encountered to date has been man bashing. Some of it has been bashing man bashers.
I have encountered essentially none that focused on women and their self-concept and self-identity.
It was a new thing for me. Feminism that didn't require guilt on my part.
I don't know how to underline that strongly enough. Analysis that was not based in the "male as oppressor/aggressor", "all men are potential rapists" school of thought.
I thought about where my head had arrived at that spot - I talked about trying - ever since I was a little kid - to be the kind of male my mom wanted my Dad to be - drank in all those criticisms. The kind of man that my Baba and Grandma wanted to see (strong women - strong feminists [for their time] - as a young woman grandma was an active suffragette for a couple of years until women got the vote) The kind of man that all those ladies I worked with as a child - listened to their conversations - the kind of man they wanted to have around. To
not have the characteristics that those men had - especially the anger and aggression - especially the bullying and the put downs - the constant put downs. Their criticisms of men mirrored my own experience as a child with boys and men (teachers) at school - what a bunch of miserable assholes - mostly mean - constant bullying and denigrating (except for two male teachers in grade school). Even our priest (Catholic School) was a miserable alcoholic bastard.
My Dad was nicer - but still bullied and intimidated to get his way. He was progressive for his day, but still did many subtle and not-so subtle put-downs... Yeah - I dare say that I can catch the subtle innuendo of sexism as fast as any woman can - I learned to identify it early - hanging onto the fingers of the ladies - standing with the top of my head barely above the counter in those community hall kitchens - and as I grew - adolescence - teen years - young adult - still helping in the kitchens - and setting up the halls - doing the stuff they had to bag at the men to do - the men would grumble about the nagging - I was the boy/man who just helped - it was my role - then they didn't have to bag at their husbands.
I'm still trying to be the answer for all those women - maybe if I'm perfect in my gender relations it will give hope to my Mom and any of those ladies that are left alive. Hope that someday things will change. Hope to my wife and all her pain. Hope to my sister. Hope to my daughter.
Hope
I'm all about hope
Dream no little dream
Smitten told me that was an enormous burden to carry - that answering for all men was perhaps a little larger task than one person should undertake.
She asked me if I had ever talked to my Mom about it - about how I felt and what I had tried to achieve - to fix things.
I haven't.
I hadn't really put it together coherently as above in one place before. I hadn't put all the pieces of the guilt and childhood intention together.
I was going to wait until I was off work to go talk to her. Pick a day when my Dad isn't around and go talk. Maybe reconciling my childhood ideas with her feelings will help either put things into perspective or perhaps allow me to achieve success. If I am not "as useless as [my] father" i will have achieved as much success as i need to... maybe.
----
I read a book the other day. Smitten lent it to me. Her brother had read it and thought it was quite powerful. Smitten hasn't read it yet. I thought it was a bunch of feel sorry for yourself, self-indulgent baby-boomer bullshit. It was
Iron John: A Book About Men, a book by American Poet Robert Bly published in 1990. This is one of the books that you will hear comedians or movies make references to when they mock the idea of a group of grown men dancing naked around a fire to get in touch with themselves, and "talking sticks"...
(Smitten's brother is a baby boomer and fits the absent father profile the book is preaching to)
Anyway - Bly did have a couple of interesting ideas. His thesis is that men have lost their own culture - that they no longer transmit knowledge from old men to young men in ritual transfer of knowledge of what it means to "be a man".
He believes that men and women are different at a basic level.
Whatever you may think of some of the underpinnings of his ideas, or the hundreds of pages of bumph that he takes to say it (hey - he is a poet after all - and i do have a soft spot for poets - so i suppose he can be forgiven) - there are couple of ideas that hit home for me.
One of them was the notion that some men have tried so hard to reject their maleness, and have tried so hard to become women in an emotional sense, that they lose their identity and become something in between. Bly identifies men and maleness with the metal iron. He says that some men become copper - a conductor. They become a bridge or a channel for the women in their lives - and that these men become a conduit for the emotion from the women in their lives.
Bly on iron and copper - full text of the chapter"What if we feel too young to inhabit the dangerous space between male and female? What if we don't like the fierce tension between straight and crooked and don't feel up to so many opposites? The child in a messed-up family may feel a ghastly tension between the addicted parent and the clean parent, between the cold of the angry father and the heat of the loving mother, or between the cold of the furious mother and the heat of the sorrowing father.
In such a situation it's relatively easy to give up iron work and take up copper work. A child can easily become a professional bridge. The child can become a conductor made of that good conducting metal, copper.
A man's copper work probably begins early by placing one hand on his father's wrathful chest and the other hand on the earth; or perhaps he places one hand on his mother's anguished heart and the other on the earth, or one hand on an adult's isolated head and the other on the earth.
The boy who becomes a conductor values himself for the complicated current that runs through his body, for his ability to conduct wrath to the ground by a quiet reply, for the self-sacrificing stretching out of his arms to touch each pole. Many of us know this sensation of conduction from early childhood: the mother and father talk to each other through the child. The shame of the alcoholic father, for example, goes through our body heading east, and the anxiety of the dependent mother goes through our body heading west. Fury and contempt pass each other, meeting somewhere in the son's or daughter's chest."
"When a man or woman becomes a conductor, the act of conducting gives us the sense that we are not shamefully narrow and limited, but that we have something for everyone."
"If a man has become copper as a boy, he will likely continue working with that metal when grown up. He may place one hand on the crown of his furious wife's head and the other hand on the earth. He may become a public apologist, conducting to earth-through his own body-centuries of justified female fury."
"The more the man agrees to be copper, the more he becomes neither alive nor dead, but a third thing, an amorphous, demasculinized, half-alive psychic conductor. I believe that a woman sometimes finds herself channeling the rage of dozens of dead women who could not speak their rage while alive. Conducting that rage is dangerous."
