Y'know, Echidne of the Snakes is a pretty four-square feminist. So check out how she "hates" men.

It's hard for me to address [anti-feminist Caitlin] Flanagan's theories as they are based on such an odd concept of what adolescent boys and adult men are all about. At the same time, she refuses to even look at the question what the culture might be teaching adolescent boys (this is very evident in the interview, the way she slithers away from any attempt to move the question to both boys and girls).

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

Good for her! She approvingly cites Amanda Marcotte's assessment of Flannagan's notions of what boys are all about (in the process doing an excellent job of capturing Flannagan's complete investment in the bogus Two Rules of Desire:

[F]or all the puffery about girlhood fascinations and diaries, Flanagan is really only making one argument, one we know really well, that goes like this:

• Boys and men only care about sex, and mainly see girls and women as these tedious obstacles between them and pussy.
• Girls and women only care about romance---the more princessy, the better---and see sex as this filthy ritual they have to perform in order to get it.
• Therefore, women should use sex as a bartering chip to get men to pretend to like us.

Amanda said it here.

So what have we got going on here? Two died-in-the-wool feminists, Echidne and Amanda, standing up pretty vigorously for men and boys, and desperately anti-feminist Flannagan blithly running them into the dirt.

Look, are there women out there who really, genuinely, truely hate men's guts? Yeah. But they're not exactly feminists are they? Stereotypes notwithstanding, feminists mostly rock when it comes to men. And yeah, they get exasperated when men fall for the kind of bullshit Flannagan shovels. But that's not quite the same thing as hate is it? Not a bit.

So over the years you might have noticed that some people stereotype the owl-poop out of whole classes of people. It's not always malign or dismissive. Sometimes stereotyping can arise from positive or shared experiences with individuals that... can get spatula'ed onto everyone who matches the "category" in question. Which might be fine if the category of persons all really were as a) ideal as claimed, and b) as interchangeable as claimed. Oh, and c) as willing to be homogenized in someone else's mind with all the thousands or millions of individuals the onlooker imagines they resemble.

When one does this -- when one opines that "oh, 'all Africans' are so beautiful and accepting" (based, say, on your Peace Corps experience in a single village in a country continent (almost) bigger and more populous than all of North and South America put together) or "Asians are my favorite students" or "ooh, librarians are hot," etc. -- one may have nothing but the best intentions but one is still engaging in objectification.

One can be no less objectifying even if the category one is drawn to is more often negatively stereotyped. In fact, one can be no less objectifying even when you yourself are a member of the negatively stereotypes category.

I mention this first because one of the most controversial forms of objectification revolves around sexual attraction. And second, because I stumbled across a pretty cool post by new-to-me male fat activist Brian of Red No. 3 who does a very cool job of distinguishing attraction from objectification.

So, I’ve noticed some of my fellow male fat admirers throwing tantrums when women object to be sexualized without consent. These dudes whine about how the women are telling them aren’t allowed to find fat bodies attractive.

Cut that shit out. Like now.

No one is out to confiscate your boners. Sexual attraction to fat bodies is totally awesome. There may be people out there who want to shame you for your sexuality, but its not these women. So, by all means, holster your outrage and listen up.

The issue these women are complaining about isn’t sexual attraction. They are asking to be treated with respect and dignity. Try not to be shocked at this stunning request. You still get that be sexually attracted to fat women. Just, maybe respect them.

And actually, strike that maybe.

Source: Red No. 3

It's definitely worth reading the whole thing. It's ok to be attracted. It's just not ok to forget the who who always and necessarily goes with your what.

Actually, if I can briefly bring in another contentious term, we're all entitled to our preferences. In fact try not being! We are not, however, and never can be entitled to the favors or affections all or even any individuals who happen to embody our preferences.

The rest of Brian's post is similarly sharp and it would be great if you just went and read the whole post. One thing I really appreciate is the way he invokes both altruism and self-interest.

This is especially important for fat women who already live in a culture that conspires to desexualize them. They often find themselves in scenarios where they are told to choose between never being desired sexually or always being objectified sexually. That’s fucked up and wrong. You should be able to know that by just basic empathy, but I’d submit that as fat admirers its in our interest to combat thin privilege and male privilege. Not just because standing with our current or prospective romantic and sexual partners on issues of basic human dignity is the right thing to do (though that really should be enough), but its in our self-interest, too. Those restricted options women face impact us, too. We are being taught that our sexuality is wrong and that if we act upon it that we are deviants. We are told we don’t deserve to open, loving relationships with partners we are sexually attracted to. We are told we shouldn’t date them because they are “unhealthy”. We are told there must be some defect that causes our sexuality. We are being denied the opportunity to embrace our sexuality in the ways men with conventional attractions take for granted. The women who complain about objectification of fat women aren’t trying to take away our sexuality, they are trying to fight for it! We should stand with them and resist those who tell us to sexualize and objectify fat women because they don’t deserve better and we don’t deserve better.

This is just brilliant. When we judge and objectify we subject ourselves to equal objectification and judgment and consequently we reduce ourselves in the eyes of others.

And this is a universal point. Brian ends his post by opening his point

Oh, and if you’re a dude who isn’t a fat admirer, feel free to take the word “fat” out above and it apply the same to you because we all know you dudes do this shit, too.

I'd just add, finally, that the likelihood that it's men who get called for objectification is more an artifact of prior dating conventions than something (stereotypically!) innate to men: as more women take the initiative in dating, as more and more women continue to ask rather than wait to be asked, it'll be easier to notice how objectification tends to be more of a human characteristic than a gendered one.

Let me take a moment away from my chronic writer's block* to say that the large group blog Gender Across Borders - a global feminist blog kind of rocks.

Just today there have been posts about

• Child Marriage: Ukuthwala in South Africa
• Female Circumcision: Comparing Muslim and Non-Muslim African Communities (Which helps explain some of the "blind persons and the elephant" nature of indifference to what you'd think should generate open-and-shut condemnation.)
• A Culture of Violence? (About the peculiar but extreme social pressure on women on the dole in Scotland to forgo perfectly legal and free contraceptive services.)

It's just all-round interesting perspectives plus clarification of issues I didn't know I don't know enough about.  Even when I thought I did.

* About this writer's block?   I dunno.  I still usually draft several posts a day, get them about 95% finished, and still can't get myself to write a closing sentence and post them.  Back. Log.  City.  Month after month.  I can comment just fine on other people's blogs.  Just not here.  Sigh.

Ok, so this is fairly long post inspired by a NSWATM post. It's about the question of whether someone who thinks him or herself a feminist could ever imagine there could ever be a circumstance where Becker's actions could be justified in contemporary, non-fringe feminist terms. The answer isn't just no in humanitarian terms, nor is it just no in never-blame-the-victim terms. It's no in terms of 40 years of feminist activism!

While pondering the problem of blaming the victim in response to limited but loud reactions to the Catherine Kieu Becker, DoctorMindBeam said

You might’ve heard about Catherine Kieu Becker, the woman who recently attacked and mutilated her husband, apparently without provocation. If you haven’t, here’s the short version of the story: They were estranged, and he had filed for divorce. She drugged him, tied him up, waited for him to wake up, cut off his penis, turned on the garbage disposal, and threw it in.

...

We talk a lot about not blaming the victims of rape, sexual harassment, assault, etc. So why is it suddenly acceptable to assume that this guy cheated on her or did something else to provoke it? Not even mentioning that even then, this action is heinous and indefensible. But why are people making that assumption?

It started for me on Facebook. I wrote about the story, briefly, and one of my friends said something to the effect of, “Why do I think that he did something to provoke this?” This morning, it spread over to The Pursuit of Harpyness. Now, I want to don kid gloves for this section. I discovered the blog because they recently gave [NSWATM] props, and so I don’t want to assume ill intent and slap them in the face. But ladies, seriously…

The victim reportedly told the police that her husband—who had initiated divorce proceedings—”deserved it.” Maybe. Maude knows, I’ve been keeping a list of men I think deserve it for some time now (yeah, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, you’re at the top).

No. Just, fucking, no. No one deserves to have their genitals brutally mutilated.

Source: No Seriously, What About Teh Menz?

First of all this is an obvious point: no blaming victims, m'kay?  No speculating about why they should be blamed.  No assuming the victim must have done something to deserve it.

Secondly, as DMB points out, in civil society no individual acting alone has the right to render another person unconscious and then mutilate them even if their victim really is a very bad person.

But third of all?  Almost no matter how you look at it, even if you could construct a case where Becker's husband "deserved" it, in contemporary non-fringe feminist terms Becker's assault is no cause at all for feminist celebration.  In fact quite the opposite!

A few years ago I took a continuing-ed course that included a feminism 101 section (the other two were sex education and communications. Best non-degree course I've ever taken!)

Anyway, at one point the women's studies professor brought up the Lorena Bobbett castration case and pointed out that contrary to popular imagination and conservative Senator's wive's bravado (“I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary,” Wendy Vitter told Newhouse News. “If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.”) most actual feminists were horrified by Bobbett's act. Here's why, here's why this is relevant to the Becker case, and here's why anyone who claims to be a feminist yet celebrates rather than abhors husband castration is a really bad feminist.

My professor pointed out, correctly, that instead of trying to escape an abusive relationship by cutting off her husband's dick she instead could have contacted a number of hotlines, agencies, support groups, and shelters, and relied on a huge array of policies, procedures, and laws that were available and well-publicized in her area.

Instead, in keeping with her deeply religiously-conservative upbringing she didn't initiate divorce proceedings against her husband the first time he came home after sleeping with prostitutes. Or the second. Or the Nth. Because of her upbringing she didn't dial 9-1-1 the first time he physically assaulted her. Or the second. Or the Nth.

In fact, when she'd gotten literally to the end of her rope and began contemplating, and then fantasizing, and then resolving to violently disable her husband in hopes of being able to get away she didn't instead contact one of the many public or private resources that could have helped her non-violently divorce her husband. She didn't try to locate of the shelters that would have helped her quietly establish a new life.

Instead she took it upon herself to wait till her husband had incapacitated himself with alcohol, cut off his dick with a kitchen knife, jumped in the car with some belongings, and drove... not really all that far because she didn't have a plan, didn't have resources, and just plain had no idea there was any real way out to begin with!

In other words, said my professor, there were multiple points where a feminist would have decided she wasn't going to put up with her husband's shit, there were multiple points where a feminist would have known she didn't have to put up with his shit, and there were multiple resources that a feminist would have known she could have taken advantage of rather than put up with his shit, and multiple resources that a feminist would have resorted to long, long, long before.

In other words, Lorena Bobbett did was a triumph of anti-feminism and not a feminist act at all.

Now this long digression is relevant to this post for two reasons:

First, it invalidates any hypothetical assumptions that Catherine Kieu Becker's actions could somehow be "justifiable." Thanks to the hard legal cases, legislative action, social activism, and educational outreach of mainstream feminists the answer is no. Even if there was any substance to speculations or assumptions about abuse (so far at least there isn't) then Becker could, and should, have made use of any of those legal, accepted, and entirely non-violent ways to exit her relationship and protect herself from her husband. Instead her decision not use any of those resources but instead to commit violence invalidates any possible justification within a feminist framework.

Second, any actual feminist who imagines Becker or Bobbett's in terms of "delightful as the thought is of some particularly loathsome men having their junk cut off…” is at best alienated from or ignorant of the achievements of contemporary feminism, or, at worst completely contemptuous of it.

So!

Even if there was ever any justification for blaming the victim of a violent crime Bobbett or Becker's actions would still be a repudiation of feminism rather than a feminist act. Consequently anyone who entertains fantasies of justifiable castration rather than speculating instead about the long chain of missed opportunities to avail one's self of feminist resources is just looking at these cases from at least a pre-feminist and possibly an anti-feminist perspective.

I mean, let's go waaay back up to the top of this too-long comment to that quote I pulled from Sen. David Vitter's arch-conservative wife Wendy Vitter:

I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary,” Wendy Vitter told Newhouse News. “If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.

That's not feminism talking.

Bottom line: do not ever assume that someone who either commits castration (or other violent assaults) on her husband is a feminist. Don't ever assume that someone who approves of such an act is a critically-conscious feminist either. For the most part the clowns and asshats we see on The View and elsewhere around the cable networks are going to have a lot more in common with Wendy Vitter than Shulamith Firestone. And not to put too fine a point on it but the trolls and "harpies" around the blogosphere who've been nodding approvingly have far, far more in common with Spearhead-style MRAs than they ever have or ever will have with mainstream feminism.