Made for each other, but not so much for us
Just a quick follow up on my previous post on the myth of man-hating.
I just want to be clear that yes, there are women who are man haters. There are even feminists who are man-haters though they're obviously going to be a minority of all man-haters both in absolute and relative terms. Many of those women identify, or are identified, as "radical feminists" or "rad-fems."
Big flipping deal. For every "rad-fem" there's a "men's rights activist" or MRA who hates, resents, dreads, and scorns women every bit as much as their rad-fem counterparts hate them.
The trick?
If there were fewer MRAs there would almost certainly be fewer rad-fems.
The point being for all the people out there squalling about "the rad fems, the rad fems" as if they all owned black helicopters and radioed instructions directly into Oprah Winfrey's brain are barking up the wrong tree. You got a problem with rad-fems the answer is to help reduce the number of MRAs. Because they inflame the entire system the way nitric oxide and peroxynitrite seem to trigger autoimmunity, fibromyalgia, PDSD, and otherwise inexplicable and difficult-to-trace flairing syndromes.
The point being for all the people out there squalling about "the rad fems, the rad fems" as if they all owned black helicopters and radioed instructions directly into Oprah Winfrey's brain are barking up the wrong tree.
One explanation for the fixation on the wrong tree (and the black helicopters) is offered by Echidne of the Snakes in this disturbing post.
Thank you for the link to the research study on nitric oxide, et al and the autoimmune diseases. An apt metaphor, fl.
[It is an apt metaphor (each chemical triggers production of the others so if anything happens at all you get spiraling flareups.) I love that they call the NO/OONO reaction "no, oh no" for short. Thanks for the link to Echidne's post too, Kochanie. --fl]
It's all reciprocal. The radical feminists are no less or more at "fault" than the MRAs. Both are stuck in the patriarchal paradigm. We all are.
[I agree that once initiated the reaction is reciprocal (in fact my original title was going to mention the old aphorism about missionaries and cannibals depending on each other.) Thanks, Selena. --fl]
bell hooks has argued pretty convincingly that the people most likely to hate men aren't radical (lesbian) feminists - it's heterosexual women who are mired in bad relationships with men who treat them like shit. (She said it more elegantly, I'm pretty sure.)
Makes sense to me.
[Yeah, I think so too. It's not that oriented lesbians (or gay men) hate the gender they're not oriented to, they mostly just want to be left alone. But yeah, just like the bitterest MRAs the bitterest
"men hater" separatists seem to have been previously married. But as you say, Bell Hooks (who, I wasn't familiar with till three people mentioned her to me in the last week) says, and I said in my post, even the most irate of "man-hating" feminists rarely hate men as much as non-feminists do. And the whole point is that there are *way* many more non-feminist man-haters than "rad-fems" but everyone focuses on them. (I ought to mention I don't think it's a coincidence because otherwise we'd have to confront why, exactly, non-feminist women hate men so much.) Thanks, Sungold! --fl]
Sungold:
I think there's a lot of evidence for that, most interestingly perhaps from Norah Vincent's "Self-Made Man" where she experienced life as a man for about a year and found a lot of man-hating was on the hetero thirty-something singles dating scene (where the women have often escaped from destructive relationships, but now judge all men in the same way), and she actually reported feeling a misogynistic reaction after experiencing life in that "game" (another self-perpetuating reciprocal reaction).
Honestly, if I look at the news, I don't think the biggest problem for women comes from MRAs or anything so new-wave. I think the biggest struggle is still against plain old old-fashioned patriarchs. Companies don't pay women less because they think male workers are oppressed, they do it because they're still not convinced that women will do the same work. It's just the trailing ends of what was mainstream a hundred years ago.
See examples like the Seattle Weekly article about domestic abuse victims having decisions made for them by the police and courts. That's not feminism and it's not a reaction to feminism. That's just ordinary thousand-year-old paternalism.
[Oh lord I agree about patriarchy and the role of feminism against it. But that's an overarching issue. And if you'll forgive my use of two buzzwords, then my point was that against that general backdrop, any actual man-hating feminists tend to be counterbalanced by woman-hating men-amists who share emotions between them that aren't necessarily elements of the general problem. For instance Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito doesn't appear to hate women, he just seems to feel passionately that you're a second-class citizens who shouldn't have the rights of first-class citizens no matter how smart, able, or deserving you might be. And, for instance, Vice President Dick Cheney simply gets pleasure out of kicking people who are down and therefore doesn't see any benefit to letting anyone up if they've been historically down. Meanwhile, though, MRAs (as we're calling them at the moment) don't see women as helpless but somehow dominant gatekeeper-y conspirators and take it *personally,* and in that they're comparable to a subset of women for whom men are similar personal (rather than institutional) antagonists. Finally, when I said I thought there'd be fewer "rad-fems" if there were fewer MRAs I didn't mean I thought there would be fewer feminists in general nor that the problems of patriarchy were as simple as getting those MRA yahoos to put a cork in it. Thanks, Holly. --fl]
Figleaf, great post, but I think you're mistaken about what it means to be a radical feminist if, as I understand you correctly, you are classifying "feminists who hate men" as "radical feminists". Sure, there are radfems who hate men, as well as liberal feminists and even non-feminists who hate men. But radical feminism is merely the notion that not only should women be paid more and get to be doctors and lawyers and everything the liberal feminists believe, but that the entire patriarchal structure of society and the notion of set gender roles needs to be dismantled.
Nothing about hating men is indicated, and indeed many radical feminists (myself included) like men quite a bit.
[Oh I know. And I should have distinguished "rad fems" from radical feminists (especially since, after reading Firestone's Dialectic of Sex I call *myself* a radical feminist with no, zero, irony nor hesitation.) And having started reading Bell Hooks for the first time an hour or so ago I should have been even more careful. All that said, though, there's... *some kind* of group of women with a few men mixed in that just get triggered like nobody's business by MRAs, who, in turn, seem to live in mortal fear of them. The problem being that the antagonism isn't reciprocal but sort of weirdly circular where MRAs unload on "rad fems" based on highly anecdotal evidence, but such unloading, however unjustified, then triggers more outpourings, which in turn fuels the MRAs again. And thus my contention that if there were fewer MRAs there'd be fewer... call them highly-triggerable people. Thanks, Dr. Leblanc. --fl]
"It's all reciprocal. The radical feminists are no less or more at "fault" than the MRAs. Both are stuck in the patriarchal paradigm. We all are."
Yes, yes, yes.
"love the jerky women, hate the jerky men" is benevolent sexism. as well as buying into "woman as victim."
[Which is not to say there aren't women victims, obviously. Heck there are even MRA victims! But they're *imposed* victims not essential ones and... here's the deal: as long as they're busy triggering each other it's almost impossible to deal with the sources of imposition. Thanks, Trin. --fl]