Gender Ambiguity
Although I did not receive the full feminist indoctrination as a child, there were certainly some strong elements of feminist theory at work in my upbringing. This was partly the work of my parents and partly the work of the public school system. So, for instance, I learned that healthy men do not see women as sexual objects, that physical and sexual aggression are learned behaviours that are not acquired by men who are well raised and that there is nothing a man can do that a woman can't do at least as well. I also learned a number of subversive things that are now taken for granted by many people of my generation: that women and men have equal rights, that sex ought to be explicitly consensual and that responsibility for any sexual aggression always lies entirely with the aggressor (who statistically is almost always a man).
Along with these basic "facts", a number of empirical observations were pointed out to me: that women do far more housework (and indeed more work in general, though perhaps men in educated couples are catching up), that men make the important decisions and take the interesting jobs, and that men actively (consciously and unconsciously) take measures to keep women in a position of subservience. That the everyday language that we use to discuss men and women reflects and re-enforces the male advantage. That men are socially rewarded for having sex with multiple partners, while women are punished. Generally I have found these observations to be true, or at the very least, not harmful to believe in even if they are not true.
But many of the theoretical arguments concerning how this comes about and what should be done about it no longer resonate with me. Healthy men do not see women as sexual objects? Was I then unhealthy from the point I hit puberty, and found my attention drawn to breasts, butts and exposed skin? How did this illness come about? I got about as correct an education as one can get in our day and age, but objectification was automatic, even for me. I not only developed an interest in pornography, but I became so interested in it that my use of it became compulsive. Believing that the root of the problem was my desire, I could only feel guilt about it, and guilt is not a very effective motivator to quit an undesired habit. I have since decided that the "objectification of women" concept needs to be dropped*. It doesn't even make sense when you think about it, especially since many feminists would agree with the popular notion that sexual fantasy is a healthy part of life: how then is this supposed to work? Fantasy is fine, but only so long as I'm lusting after someone I actually know and have to interact with on a daily basis?
Or what about men only acting aggressively towards women because of the culture they have learned? One thing I told myself I would never do was to pursue a relationship with someone who did not want it. I did not even believe myself capable of it, so strongly did I believe that I had been properly raised and that such boorish behaviour could only be the result of a hyper-masculine upbringing. And mid-way through my undergraduate career I wound up stalking someone for several months. Somehow I had learned subconsciously, without being aware of it, that I should do exactly those things which consciously I believed to be abhorrent? Imagine my ideological confusion and dismay...
The most damaging part of the whole system, is that all the bad elements of "maleness" are believed to be learned, rather than innate. This lends an aura of voluntarity to everything a man does wrong: if a guy has been known to overstep the bounds of civil behaviour, he should be shunned until he "learns the error of his ways", or he should be pummeled with propaganda alien to his world-view until such time as its obvious truth should sink into his mind and replace his mistaken beliefs about gender relations. But is this really practical (indeed, I have this complaint of many re-education schemes)? I believe that there are many things that, once learned, are nearly impossible for the average person to unlearn (phonetics are a nice example: many adults cannot loose a foreign accent in a second or third language). In this view, it doesn't really matter if masculinity is something one is born with or something one picks up from one's culture: once one learns it one is stuck with it. You might be able to build something "more positive" on top of it, but the foundation isn't going to go away.
And of course, even if you do want to learn how to act in a way that isn't gender oppressing, you're not going to get as much help as you might expect. Suppose (hypothetically of course) that you'd been stalking someone for a few weeks, that you were feeling massively guilty about it 22 out of 24 hours a day, but that in those remaining 2 hours you were obsessively lapsing into frantic attempts at communication with a very unwilling audience. Perhaps it might have occurred to you that you could hardly be the first person to have stalked someone, and that many of them were probably not all that pleased with what they had been doing, and that, damn it, someone had probably figured out a nice 12 step program to reign oneself in once one had fallen off the wagon of respectable courting behaviour. So maybe you googled "prevent stalking", thinking: what better way to prevent stalking than to address the perpetrators directly? Well guess what? Nobody seemed to have realized that stalkers might actually want to prevent themselves from being creeps. All you got was a host of sites telling you how to deal with someone else stalking you. Apparently no-one was available to help the stalkers themselves.
Now none of this should be taken to mean that I think we should just give up on the idea of gender equality and on the idea that violence towards women by men is both terrible and substantially preventable. Indeed just having public agreement that men do not have the right to do whatever they please to women is a significant step in the right direction that may have had some positive benefits. But I'm not convinced that the vision of a man who feels no lust (unless it is solicited) and who never feels an urge to behave violently (unless there's some oppressive injustice to fight) is a realistic one. It seems to me to be far more productive to assume that those feelings will be present in many, if not most, men and that efforts should be focused on finding ways of deflecting and defusing those emotions before they are manifested as violent or intimidating acts.
*the idea that pornography is problematic however, has not left me, for a variety of reasons that I will discuss in detail in some future post. The essence of my position is that: a) intense sexual content all too frequently comes mixed with aggression or violence, at least in the most accessible (cheap/free) media such as the internet and television, and consuming large amounts of sexually violent material is probably not healthy; and b) there is strong indication in my view that the production of pornography frequently involves aggression towards women and in some cases brutal violence, and that this problem, while by no means universal in the industry, is an unavoidable bi-product of the legitimization of pornography.
Along with these basic "facts", a number of empirical observations were pointed out to me: that women do far more housework (and indeed more work in general, though perhaps men in educated couples are catching up), that men make the important decisions and take the interesting jobs, and that men actively (consciously and unconsciously) take measures to keep women in a position of subservience. That the everyday language that we use to discuss men and women reflects and re-enforces the male advantage. That men are socially rewarded for having sex with multiple partners, while women are punished. Generally I have found these observations to be true, or at the very least, not harmful to believe in even if they are not true.
But many of the theoretical arguments concerning how this comes about and what should be done about it no longer resonate with me. Healthy men do not see women as sexual objects? Was I then unhealthy from the point I hit puberty, and found my attention drawn to breasts, butts and exposed skin? How did this illness come about? I got about as correct an education as one can get in our day and age, but objectification was automatic, even for me. I not only developed an interest in pornography, but I became so interested in it that my use of it became compulsive. Believing that the root of the problem was my desire, I could only feel guilt about it, and guilt is not a very effective motivator to quit an undesired habit. I have since decided that the "objectification of women" concept needs to be dropped*. It doesn't even make sense when you think about it, especially since many feminists would agree with the popular notion that sexual fantasy is a healthy part of life: how then is this supposed to work? Fantasy is fine, but only so long as I'm lusting after someone I actually know and have to interact with on a daily basis?
Or what about men only acting aggressively towards women because of the culture they have learned? One thing I told myself I would never do was to pursue a relationship with someone who did not want it. I did not even believe myself capable of it, so strongly did I believe that I had been properly raised and that such boorish behaviour could only be the result of a hyper-masculine upbringing. And mid-way through my undergraduate career I wound up stalking someone for several months. Somehow I had learned subconsciously, without being aware of it, that I should do exactly those things which consciously I believed to be abhorrent? Imagine my ideological confusion and dismay...
The most damaging part of the whole system, is that all the bad elements of "maleness" are believed to be learned, rather than innate. This lends an aura of voluntarity to everything a man does wrong: if a guy has been known to overstep the bounds of civil behaviour, he should be shunned until he "learns the error of his ways", or he should be pummeled with propaganda alien to his world-view until such time as its obvious truth should sink into his mind and replace his mistaken beliefs about gender relations. But is this really practical (indeed, I have this complaint of many re-education schemes)? I believe that there are many things that, once learned, are nearly impossible for the average person to unlearn (phonetics are a nice example: many adults cannot loose a foreign accent in a second or third language). In this view, it doesn't really matter if masculinity is something one is born with or something one picks up from one's culture: once one learns it one is stuck with it. You might be able to build something "more positive" on top of it, but the foundation isn't going to go away.
And of course, even if you do want to learn how to act in a way that isn't gender oppressing, you're not going to get as much help as you might expect. Suppose (hypothetically of course) that you'd been stalking someone for a few weeks, that you were feeling massively guilty about it 22 out of 24 hours a day, but that in those remaining 2 hours you were obsessively lapsing into frantic attempts at communication with a very unwilling audience. Perhaps it might have occurred to you that you could hardly be the first person to have stalked someone, and that many of them were probably not all that pleased with what they had been doing, and that, damn it, someone had probably figured out a nice 12 step program to reign oneself in once one had fallen off the wagon of respectable courting behaviour. So maybe you googled "prevent stalking", thinking: what better way to prevent stalking than to address the perpetrators directly? Well guess what? Nobody seemed to have realized that stalkers might actually want to prevent themselves from being creeps. All you got was a host of sites telling you how to deal with someone else stalking you. Apparently no-one was available to help the stalkers themselves.
Now none of this should be taken to mean that I think we should just give up on the idea of gender equality and on the idea that violence towards women by men is both terrible and substantially preventable. Indeed just having public agreement that men do not have the right to do whatever they please to women is a significant step in the right direction that may have had some positive benefits. But I'm not convinced that the vision of a man who feels no lust (unless it is solicited) and who never feels an urge to behave violently (unless there's some oppressive injustice to fight) is a realistic one. It seems to me to be far more productive to assume that those feelings will be present in many, if not most, men and that efforts should be focused on finding ways of deflecting and defusing those emotions before they are manifested as violent or intimidating acts.
*the idea that pornography is problematic however, has not left me, for a variety of reasons that I will discuss in detail in some future post. The essence of my position is that: a) intense sexual content all too frequently comes mixed with aggression or violence, at least in the most accessible (cheap/free) media such as the internet and television, and consuming large amounts of sexually violent material is probably not healthy; and b) there is strong indication in my view that the production of pornography frequently involves aggression towards women and in some cases brutal violence, and that this problem, while by no means universal in the industry, is an unavoidable bi-product of the legitimization of pornography.