Mundanity vs. Misogyny
Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, an early John Edwards supporter, reacting to the evidently large number of 'wingers needling her about it suggests that
[T]hey suck and are horrible people who really, really hate women, in no small part because they’re stuck in a self-perpetuating no sex/misogyny loop.
Read the quote in context here.
Having no access to Pandagon server logs I can make no independent assessment of those who are pinging her with trackbacks. I *can* say, however, that her point about the self-perpetuating no-sex/misogyny loop rings a bell.
Traveling as I am through the rural and small-town midwest I've had occasion to encounter, closely or very peripherally, all manner of people of all ages, classes, various races, religions, and nations of origin, and social statuses and all I can say I don't think any of them, regardless of status, seem to have had any trouble finding partners or reproducing. At all.
Which I think puts a serious kink in the proposition that "low status" men are necessarily doomed to lives without partners or children.
Misogyny, on the other hand, knows neither class nor status. In fact the only benefit status and class seems to confer on misogynists is the ability to buy one's way, at least temporarily, into something that looks like relationships. That and the ability, maybe, to try and convince others that relationships like their are supposed to be desirable and/or the norm... or that it's anything but women's "gold-digging" that's responsible for men's sexual unhappiness.
"Which I think puts a serious kink in the proposition that "low status" men are necessarily doomed to lives without partners or children."
Exactly. That's what's been bugging me about this discussion. Most of the people not having sex, as far as I can tell, are the ones who have unreasonable expectations of reality. I think it's a problem amongst people whose standards are ridiculously high re: money, model looks, or pack status in general.
I feel like my comments on this topic haven't been super helpful, and I feel bad for sort of conceding at one point that "low-status" men not getting what they want is the main issue here. Getting rejected, possibly because you have unrealistic expectations, is not really comparable to not feeling safe from sexual assault.
Probably I will go away for a while to relax and enjoy the taste of foot, but I hope my flailing hasn't been actively confusing other people. And thanks for this post; it was very helpful.
I think as long as you fail to understand that men's expectations are bound up with women's expectations of their success in the patriarchy, you will continue to discount men's pain, as men (in the aggregate) apparently continue to discount women's pain (as Hollaback, etc clearly display.) The two problems are not coterminous, of course, but they feed off of each other--if you ask a street harasser what he's doing, he'll reply that he's preserving his agency in a system that makes him invisible. So while we have the full force of law and the state bent on preserving women's safety from sexual assault and harassment, feminism acts to vilify men whose main offense is discerning post-modern life's distortion of traditional mating behaviors and family structure. The two (law vs. a social movement) are not comparable in their import and impact. For the more lucid critics, the problems of yanking people back into patriarchy as a solution are apparent. (This is why Tom Leykis, the shock-jock talk radio DJ, gets a certain amount of flak.)
What people fail to realize is that patriarchy is a self-reinforcing system for the men who are forced to serve it without its benefits as well, a watertight system that cares not how far they "tune in, drop out, and turn on". But, y'know, if you just want to chalk it up to "unrealistic expectations", feel free. Deliberate obtuseness has never been a missing quality in ANY branch of feminist thought.
Hi, Eurosabra. You said "What people fail to realize is that patriarchy is a self-reinforcing system for the men who are forced to serve it without its benefits as well..."
What I don't get, then, is that people know... that *you* know... that the problem is patriarchy and so you blame *feminists?* Question #1: how's that been working for you? Question #2: who's benefits when you attack feminism when patriarchy hurts you?
figleaf
Well, because it finished off the work of the Holocaust (along with the rest of modernity) in destroying the clan, kinship, trade, craftsmanship and scholarly networks that gave life in my community meaning in our content, pre-modern (if not pre-capitalist) state? Because it made it impossible for me to get married even by re-assuming a pre-modern lifestyle, while raising the material bar for marriage among the assimilated beyond the means of someone whose major stock-in-trade is cultural goods that USED to be honored within the old system? I know RECORD numbers of Satmar, Bobover, and Lubavitcher Hasidim, the equivalent of Old Order Amish, who find their family structure going to pieces because of the siren song of America. (There is a serious problem of men refusing to grant divorces in Israel, the only place where they still have that kind of leverage, elsewhere "the law of the [non-Jewish] kingdom is the law.") Now, it's true that I can't really assume a pre-modern stance since I'm no longer within that community, but that community is itself no longer as cohesive as the FLDS or even regular LDS. So it's more like the choice between a modernity that passes me by despite my assimilation, and a past that that modernity has done to death anyway. Also, I don't really enjoy the idea of limiting the rights of others, and I think it's a bit more dignified to admit that the Enlightenment is a done deal, so besides my griping here I actually LOOK like a regular Israeli-American in my real life. (I get called a fascist enough in other fora, because "Liberal Zionism" apparently...isn't. But I'll leave Israeli constitutional law aside for the moment.)
So the answer is, "Yes, and, but only with a little bit of pining for a lost paradise (which I will agree with fl, was never that great anyway.)" Um, yeah, I'm full of contradictions. So be it.
You know, I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea that norms of masculinity hurt men, but I'm sick of it being phrased as a "no" to feminism rather than "yes and".
Also, "men tend to have unrealistic expectations" does not mean "blame men for everything" and it does not mean "stop asking questions". It just means that the solution to men's problems is more complex than telling women to shut up and put out more. Anorexics have unrealistic expectations too, but that doesn't mean that we should go around kicking them or that the problem is all in their heads. It just means that weight loss programs are the wrong place to look for a solution to anorexia.
Key phrase is "rural and small-town midwest." Places where people are more likely to have met their partners through INTACT social networks, like school/hobby groups/church etc. The atomized, impersonal social scene of the 20s/30s-aged coastal urban dweller means snap decisions made with imperfect information on the basis of appearance and social status cues. I really don't see very many easy or happy pairings except among people who brought the "Midwest" with them via attending faith-identified colleges or universities, or people who buy into and project the fast-moving urban sexuality. Of course, YMMV.
It IS worth noting that the societies with LEAST violence against women (Scandinavia) are the ones that report more people pairing up monogamously at a younger age, and the societies with the most are ones in which the marriage market is glorified trafficking (Afghanistan, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iran) with actual harems or mate-hoarding. (Google "muta'a marriage"). P. Burke is right that the two issues aren't really comparable, but no WESTERN society (other than the Balkans) has so far experienced "wilding" on the scale of other non-Western societies, although it's interesting that social status seems to play an ambiguous role at least as far as NYC goes. (Robert Chambers, etc. was equally violent in the same geographic location.) We are dealing with single-digit numbers of cases, so we can assume that the vast majority of isolated low-status men, at least in the West, are not sex offenders. Whereas in the Balkans, the vast majority of rapist thugs apparently WERE low-status men, because that's who joins a militia. War and "othering" are apparently necessary but not sufficient conditions, because (at various times) ethno-religious war in Israel-Palestine (my own neck of the woods) has been at least as savage as the Balkans, but characterized by very little rape. (A few tens of cases in 60 years of civil and inter-state war.) A recent Hebrew U paper held that rape was so RARE because the "Othering" was so complete that I/P dwellers were compelled to AVOID sexual contact with the inhuman, disgusting Othered Enemy. Which is a ridiculous thesis considering that until 10-20 years ago 20-30% of the involved populations were completely bilingual and today the proportion is still around 10-20%, But I digress.