Since I’ve been talking a lot lately about the effects and influences of gender bias, gender assumptions and patriarchy on men I thought I ought to mention a large, and previously understated premise: Patriarchy isn’t zero sum, it’s negative sum. Similarly, and contrary to an astonishing percentage of non- and anti-feminists, feminism isn’t zero sum, it’s positive sum.
I think you’d have to be insane to claim (as, say, MRAs, Heather MacDonald, and Laura Sessions Stepp sometimes do) that men are ever anything like as oppressed by patriarchy than women.
But you’d have to keep a pretty narrow focus to consistently assert that patriarchy is a net gain for men either.
And before you stop me right there let me stop you right there and say that because patriarchy isn’t a zero-sum game it’s a huge mistake to play it (as, again MRAs, MacDonald, Stepp, and others do) as an oppression olympics.
A mistake because, as I’ve said, unlike the aforementioned apologists I don’t think there’s any question who’s more oppressed. But a mistake as well because since patriarchy is a negative-sum game there’s more than enough losing-the-game to go around.
On the flip side feminism, even so-called “old school” or “2nd-wave” feminism, is a positive-sum game. It’s unquestionably offers benefits for women but there’s also no question that it benefits men as well. And not beneficial in the sense that if we (meaning especially men) stop dragging ourselves and other people down we get to some kind of tepid zero. Instead I mean beneficial in the sense that when the dragging stops entirely new opportunities are going to start popping up.
The most significant self-oppression for men, by the way, is that “for us men this is as good as it gets.” It happens to be a lie, of course. And, worse, it happens to be a lie men tell themselves. And, worse than that, it’s a lie men are… pretty aware is a lie.
The trick I’m working on is to look for ways to entice men to reconsider the lie. One way to do that is to try and articulate where it’s a lie. Another is to try and point out to some of the immediate opportunities the alternatives to patriarchy present. And since I’m not sure exactly what I’m doing, yet, I’m going to land on my face the way regular readers know I occasionally do. If so I’ll go back and try it again till I get it right. It just feels like the stakes are too important not to.
Fig, I enjoy your postings an
Submitted by Thaddeus Blanchette (not verified) on Thu, 2010-06-03 08:18.Fig, I enjoy your postings an awful lot but one of the things I wonder about is the way you constantly seem to move back towards a marxist-themed understanding of power and repression. The more Foucault I read and the more I look at how gender actually works, the more I’m inclined to believe that questions as to which gender is “more oppressed” are pretty silly.
First of all, we can’t measure this objectively so it’s always going to be a game of who cries the loudest or rhetorically mobilizes more subjective experience.
Secondly, the older I get, the more I find (as your blog often shows) that men’s oppression is so totally naturalized by almost everyone that it’s difficult to even COMMENT about it, let alone critique it. Meanwhile, women’s oppression has been mapped down to the microscale. There are books and articles out there for every corner of women’s experience, analyzing how it’s tied into patriarchy, but today – 30 years after I began to ask these questions – about the only books you find on male oppression are written by 40-something bitter anti-feminists.
Today, a 19-year-od son of friend of mine leaves for the Marines. His mom and dad are peace activists and yet he feels that it’s his “duty” to go fight for a corporate war in Iraq.
How does this become his “duty” and why is this duty understood to be almost exclusively male?
How is it that while the fact that men are more often than not the perpetrators of violence is widely recognized, the fact that they are massively and disproportionately its victims is somehow overlooked?
Why is the discrepancy between male and female life-expectancies not a gender issue, as it surely would be were it reversed?
It seems to me that the pre-modern belief in Classes as units of social activities permeates the notion that one gender is more oppressed than the other. Meanwhile, this notion ignores what Foucault’s taught us about power: that it is more often than not inscribed at the micro- and daily level of existence, and not enacted in simple, class-oriented blocks.
So my question to you is this: does your notion of oppression follow some sort of greater post-Foucaultian synthesis that I’m having a hard time grasping? Or is it a carry-over from 2nd-wave feminism’s marxist roots?
[The only Foucoult I really dug into was “Discipline and Punish” for a social-theory class. But we also read a lot of Marx, Freud, Dewey, Hegel, Piaget, and Hannah Arendt so I’ve got a lot more “dead white Germans” than “dead white Frenchmen” in my curriculum. On the other hand I seriously enjoyed Discipline and Punish — the following year’s curriculum on that track would have been all about Focault but I was already moving into the history and philosophy of science so I jumped tracks. But anyway, yes, absolutely, the question of what makes 19-year-olds think it’s “duty” that compels them to join the army instead of, say, interest, concern, anger, burden-sharing, etc. is pretty important. Same with the whole deal about men agonizing about “what makes a man a man.” Anyway, I think I’ll probably organically move away from class terms like “man” or “duty” when broader society stops thinking concepts are important enough to ruin their lives trying to embody them. Same with “oppression.” Speaking of which, one thing I definitely took away from Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” was how little our social narratives take into account the energy we put into policing, a.k.a. oppressing ourselves. Or how we come to do so. I suspect if I’d read more Foucault I’d be better able to answer the question about how your friend’s young son’s call of duty operates against the rest of his upbringing. Hm… Thanks, Thaddeus. —fl]
I think that one way to get
Submitted by Danny (not verified) on Sun, 2010-06-20 18:53.I think that one way to get men to recognize the lie is not come down on those who are trying to bring the lie to the table like a ton of bricks (whether those bricks are thrown by feminists, anti-feminists, non feminists or whoever).
You say in your post, “But you’d have to keep a pretty narrow focus to consistently assert that patriarchy is a net gain for men either.”
In my time of dealing with feminists online a lot of them seem to do just what you say there. Declare that men are privileged with the occasional mention of “patriarchy hurts men too”. Now while that’s a start it really doesn’t get down to the exact parts of The System that harm men (in fact given the damage it does to men I don’t even use the word patriarchy to describe this all around damaging system we find ourselves in today) much less address them.
Thaddeus:
“Secondly, the older I get, the more I find (as your blog often shows) that men’s oppression is so totally naturalized by almost everyone that it’s difficult to even COMMENT about it, let alone critique it.”
And it also doesn’t help that people who critique it are shouted down by those who either don’t notice male oppression, those who don’t think it exists, and/or those who profit from it (therefore need it therefore will go against any who dare question it).