And Since Anti-Feminists Hate Men Anyway...

PhysioProf, guest-blogging at Feministe melodramatically asks a sincere question: "What the fuck is up with men calling themselves feminists?"

Making a big melodramatic display of tagging oneself with the “feminist” label seems like transparent male cookie-seeking at best, and cover for some seriously nefarious wackaloon shit at worst, as in the case of our male feminist sex criminal friend Payne. (Of course, maybe tagging myself with the “I don’t call myself a feminist” label is just more subtle cookie-seeking! HAHAHAH!) Read the quote in context here.

A couple of weeks ago Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon answered the question while tackling a post by anti-feminist Kathleen Parker

“But Amanda,” you might say, “How can you say Kathleen Parker hates men when she wrote a book called ‘Save the Males’?” I say that because Parker can only bring herself to defend rapists, gropers, and men that are too stupid to breathe.  If you don’t belong to one of those groups, I get the impression that Parker doesn’t think you’re a man at all.  If that definition of manhood---stupid and cruel---doesn’t seem anti-male to you, there’s not much I can do for you.

The article is basically an Americanized rehash of the Taliban’s arguments about how women’s presence needs to be controlled and covered up because men are animals who have to rape you if they see sideboob.
Read the quote in context here.

That about sums it up. If anti-feminists didn't manifestly hate men worse than poison, and if feminism asked more of men than that we live up to our potential instead of down to anti-feminist expectations, then sure, men calling themselves feminists would be a little odd. Instead, though, for men the choice between what Marcotte wants for men and what Parker does is or really *really* ought to be pretty clear.

Likewise if gender relations was a zero-sum game where gains by feminism could come *only* at the expense of men then sure, it would be peculiar for men to imagine themselves feminists. Instead feminism is *not* a zero-sum game. By almost any metric men with feminist partners are better off -- we live longer, we have more fulfilling lives, we get to enjoy our families more, and (in the face of yet another anti-feminist canard) we even enjoy our sex lives more.

And let me just expand on one of the biggest quibbles with men in feminism: that it's as peculiar, contradictory, or wrong for a man to say he's a feminist as it would be for an Anglo-American, no matter how opposed to racism, to say he was African-American.

That assumes, again, that men can have no *intrinsic* shared interests with feminism any more than Anglo-Americans could have *intrinsic* shared interests with African-Americans. But check it out: in Virginia before the American Civil War the fear of slave insurrection was so high that a third of all able-bodied men were required to take part in a standing militia! (This, by the way, throws the recent Supreme Court ruling about militias into an even more peculiar light but I digress....) Another quirk? As in much of the South during the Civil War, actual *slave owners* were exempt from service in the militia (because slave owners were, you know, supposed to be home keeping their slaves "in order") so basically by definition the militia was comprised of semi-conscripted Anglo-American men with no direct economic interest in slavery. So! Is it correct to say that vast numbers of Anglo-American men, women, and their children were economically and socially as well off in a racist, slave-owning militarized society as they might have been in an egalitarian/freeholder/entrepreneurial society?

Were Anglo-Americans better off than African-Americans? Darn right. But were they as well off as they would have been if the entirety of society hadn't been warped to support slavery? As well off as, say, now? For all but a handful of a handful absolutely not, and even the handful of nominal beneficiaries would have been objectively better off in some other line of work.

Add in the part where the majority of non-slave-owning-class Anglo-American were constrained by law and custom, by instilled fear, by manifestly false assurances of superiority on the one hand and surprisingly harsh regulation on the other (remember, for instance, that originally only *land-owning* white American males could vote) and the ugly bones of the racist system begin to peak out. (As the stalwartly nationalist/racist, Kathleen-Parker-of-his-day Rudyard Kipling bald-facedly put it in a nominally sympathetic poem, "For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute! / But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot")

In other words the *expectation* placed on Anglo-Americans *as a class* in order to maintain the status-quo imposed a gigantic, and unnecessary, and soul-selling / damnation-seeking burden that benefited a minority inside that class was such that a *typical* class member could in good faith agitate against slavery and/or racism not merely out of altruism or decency but out of his or her own considered and considerable self-interest.

And so to the extent men recognize the burden imposed on the majority of us in order to maintain a system that hampers women limits men as well. And to the extent that the only philosophy dedicated to overturning that system happens to be labeled "feminism." And if one is interested in starting a stampede for the exits of that system, then... what the heck else should we call ourselves?

Actually, technically, because for certain subsets of people the nomenclature is *so* contentious that if just plain nothing else is going to get done because some "dude" (in their parlance) says he's a feminist then the alternative would be to say one is an anti-anti-feminist. As long as the objective (equality of power and not just opportunity between sexes, dismantling of gender as constructed by the likes of Kathleen Parker types) is the same as feminism then anti-anti-feminism, if a little wordy, is good too... although if you cancel the double negative you get...