_This second post is a follow up to The New York Times, searching perhaps for alliteration, picked an unfortunate and/or loaded term in Saturday’s Op/Ed piece:

But the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved. Did the feminist revolution end up benefiting men more than women?

Read the quote in context here.

Except for one big thing, what she’s talking about, and its source, is actually semi-reasonable, as she makes clear when you read further:

When women stepped into male- dominated realms, they put more demands — and stress — on themselves. If they once judged themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens and dinner parties, now they judge themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens, dinner parties — and grad school, work, office deadlines and meshing a two-career marriage.

Well yeah, if you’re just adding expectations to one gender instead of redistributing them across all of them then you’re committing to a lot more effort at the same time your chances of success will diminish at least somewhat. Even when men pick up some of the slack. Even though some women can have it all.

All that can be true and yet…

And yet what a choice of words in Dowd’s first sentence! “Aggrieved” is a wonderfully anti-feminist buzzword.

Here’s how Dictionary.com defines grievance

1. a circumstance thought to be unjust or injurious and ground for complaint or resentment
2. complaint or resentment, or a statement expressing this, against a real or imagined wrong

1. a complaint arising from circumstances or conditions relating to one’s employment

Source

Grievances are not brought by superiors against subordinates. Grievances are not filed against one’s self. And so to say women are “aggrieved” is just one more way of locating women in the traditional role of supplicants, of nagging, whining or complaining. Of that most stereotypical of traditional gendered emotions: disappointment.

More to the point, though, “aggrieved” was Dowd’s choice of words. And if she presented herself as steadfastly progressive, as a revolutionary theorist, as a radical feminist, as a crusader for gender deconstruction, or as anyone else with a clear and frequently-articulated vision of where men and women ought to be going I’d hear her rhetoric of grievance a little differently. But she’s not! I’m not saying she’s not feminist (not at all.) I’m just saying she’s not been very good about articulating how our expectations, for ourselves and others, have shifted since the 1970s when the “baseline” study she compares us to today was made and when, incidentally, she began her own career.

In fact, you wanna know what life was like for women back then? Check it out…

In two paragraphs about California’s first woman state senator and assemblywoman Ariel of Feministing says all you really need to know about where feminism got its reputation for “humorlessness” and confrontation.

When [Rose Ann] Vuich arrived [as the first woman elected to the California State Senate, in 1976], there was no bathroom, and no recreational, social, or other facilities for women legislators. She became so incensed when her colleagues would address the Senate as “Gentlemen” that she rang a bell at her desk each time to remind them women had finally infiltrated the boy’s club.

By 1986, the mostly-female legislative staff members, including schedulers, legislative aides and the like, were still referred to as “girls.” Newly-elected Assemblywoman Bev Hansen was on the Assembly floor with a male colleague. A second Assemblyman approached and said, “Well look at that! I didn’t know they were letting the girls on the floor.” His male colleague replied, “Assemblyman, meet Assemblywoman Hansen.”

She said it here.

If you’re old enough to remember the 1970s at all you probably remember that the idea of “unisex” bathrooms outside the home was such an alien concept that municipal and state lawmakers routinely proposed making them or more accurately keeping them illegal. Which made the lack of women’s restrooms in the Senate more than an inconvenience for Vuich.

Please don’t confuse this with a “hey, women are making progress so what are you complaining about” pitch. I’m sort of kind of mostly sure even Dick Cheney wouldn’t want to go back to a time when state legislatures simply didn’t have women’s rooms in their capitol buildings. In fact I’m kind of sure that if, say, Mary Matalin had walked up to Cheney saying there was no women’s restroom in the undisclosed location he’d have said “that’s dumb, I’ll force some of my detainees build you one.” Point being she wouldn’t have brought it up as a grievance, nor would he have particularly received it as a supplication because that’s now an expectation. (Another expectation, oddly enough, is that right-wing hacks may be willing to roll the clock back for everyone else but they’re perfectly sanguine about paying women enormous amounts of money to help them do so. And those women evidently have high enough expectations about their own identities and career potential that it gives them no qualms to do so.)

Sheesh. I’m packing for a three-day camping trip with one of my children’s classes and it feels like I’m not being very focused here. But what I’m trying to say in the last paragraph is that there are two ways to measure gender progress — one by the actual progress, which is fine and yeah, if that was all there was to it then sure, what are them durn feminimisminists complaining about?

But the more significant way to measure progress is by what are the _expectations! By which standard you should be overjoyed by your Pentium II computer running Windows 3.2 because, geesh they sure didn’t have those in 1972 when the study Dowd is carping about set the baseline standard for men’s and women’s happiness. (Heck, I happen to vaguely remember that in 1974 a 4-function calculator was the size of a desktop computer! By which standard having an original Apple II ought to leave everyone over the moon!)

The point being that with expectations you can actually be making giant strides in progress while still feeling like you’re falling behind because your (perfectly reasonable!) expectations are growing even faster. What’s funny (and part of why I like the analogy) is that’s not even a controversial statement in computer technology!

I mean, yeah, you’ll still find people in computers being “aggrieved,” even legitimately aggrieved! But way, way more often a more accurate term would be “impatient.” Also “exasperated.” Oh, and “frustrated,” mostly by hidebound, foot-dragging, short-sighted, and pound-foolish obstacles to ever increasing, and usually perfectly reasonable expectations. And yet… and yet… you never hear someone in computer technology saying “we’re unhappy with the pace of progress, we were better off back in the days of 1,400 baud modems!”

So why, oh why, are so many people including cultural commentators like Dowd who, seriously, ought to know better working inside the frame that defines feminism as whiny, perpetually no-satisfying-some-women, and “aggrieved?” Instead of the perfectly reasonable, even more accurate, and compatible-with-the-cultural-zeitgeist framing like “impatience,” “enthusiasm,” “exasperation,” “anticipation,” or even “frustrated” by the slowness of the pace change in the face of rising expectations?

In computer terms there’s nobody accusing customers of “pushiness” for waiting impatiently for, say, Apple to release an iPhone-capable tablet computer, nor are customers said to be “aggrieved” by Apple’s incomprehensible partnership with the infuriatingly slow and spottily-connected AT&T Wireless. So why use that kind of language when you’re talking about other fast-moving developments like feminism?

Photo by Flickr user kristykay22. Used under a Creative Commons license.

The title of this post by Hugo Schwyzer says it all

“A man getting a gender studies major is most likely to be gay”: on the importance of refuting that problematic stereotypeRead his associated post here.

My initial reaction, while colorful, would have sounded highly ironic so I’ll just say I agree with Hugo and strongly disagree with the notion that men have to be gay to be interested in gender studies. If nothing else, 10,000 years of unreflectively othering everybody else has tended to leave us straight, locally-dominant-ethnicity males aaaaabout 9,975 years out of date. (Or worse! For instance I don’t really see Hammurabi shooting his friends in the face the way Dick Cheney, the current apical bud of patriarchy, did.) And whereas regarding women as if they were real estate or cattle might have seemed logical for a bunch of highly bellicose, pre-literate, barely post-nomadic goat herders with no better social models to work with it’s… been a while. So I’m just not seeing where you’d have to be gay, or even have mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, or other female lovers, friends, and acquaintances that you cared about, to take interest in or benefit from gender studies.

(More to the point, a good, non-dependent starting point for gender studies for men might be looking into the phobia part, the constant, uncertain fear men, even nominally “manly” men experience, that leads to homophobia in the first place. Because, seriously, minus the phobia part homosexuality is approximately as threatening as, as common as, and as blamelessly uneventful as Presbyterianism.)

Oh, and while I go (unfairly only for the most part) picking on Slate’s XX-Factor, and since I’m enjoying the heck out of my women’s studies course, I ought to mention that Juliet Lapidos has a post up titled “Women’s Studies, the Bane of Feminism?”

In college, I steered clear of the fringe, identity-focused courses. I figured I could learn about feminism or African-American history through conscientious professors in mainstream departments. Plus, it bothered me that gender and/or women’s studies classes were populated entirely by women and gay men, and Af Am classes almost entirely by black students. The demographics seemed like an admission of defeat…

Source: Julie Lapidos, XX-Factor

This is one of those situations where someone’s conclusion can be 100% logically correct, and even mildly agreeable, but not very helpful. (See also the impeccable but not terribly useful logic of “if we had ham we could have ham and eggs if we had eggs.”) The quibbles being that, oh, say, not all professors in mainstream departments are conscientious and not all women’s studies students (nor, for that matter, all professors) are women.

I do know that I’m getting some benefit from it, as I’ve mentioned. Although to be fair to Lapidos that might qualify as preaching to “our own.” But I wouldn’t say the surprisingly high-to-me mix of Asian, Pacific-Islander, African, Latin American, inner-city, lower-socio-economic-status, and traditional/conservative-religious women in the class necessarily count as “our own” either but they’re doing pretty well. Nor am I sure sure the other men, many of equally diverse heritage, who make up, oh, roughly 20% of the class fit the standard description either. And they’re doing pretty well too. And I, who in an only slightly different universe might have been one of those “conscientious professors in mainstream departments,” know a lot of… stuff… about women in history, politics, arts, science, and letters… but I’m still learning all kinds of stuff.

Yeah, over time, I think that having specific separate women’s studies and/or gender studies departments is a bit of a temporal coincidence. Come back in 100 years and see if, like, say, the once-new discipline of statistics, most women’s studies topics haven’t become intradepartmental rather than interdepartmental. But, for that matter, there still seem to be degree programs in statistics. So there must still be some use for separate departments and/or departmental subspecialties after all.

—-

Oh yeah, one of the cool things I learned this week: the earliest school of feminism, today known as cultural feminism but also known, sometimes derisively, as “difference feminism” or “exceptional feminism” tends to focus heavily on how women are different from men. Especially in the 19th Century, when it began, but also sometimes today, cultural feminists argued that women’s “better qualities” such as greater temperance and moral fiber made them as suited or even better suited to run things. Notice, however, that anti-feminists spend their time making near-identical arguments only with the arrows pointing the other way. By focusing on differences cultural feminists benefit everybody including men by calling out variation that, evidently, had been denied, ignored, or overlooked back when conscientious but untutored professors roamed the Earth.

And then, I learned, there’s (Classical) Liberal Feminism, which, almost opposite to cultural feminism in focus if not degree, tends to reflect upon the similarities between men and women and to agitate for equality of pay, legal standing, and political and social rights.

And yes, sometimes, like their anti-feminist counterparts, some of the more privileged and/or less-well-informed classical feminists wax about and advocate for recognition of the natural superiority of their gender — many nominally radical “rad-fems” are really cultural feminists. Nor is every liberal feminists hunky-dory either — Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse, a political conservative, is nevertheless a liberal feminist who will tirelessly fight to make sure the law makes no gender distinctions… when it forbids homeless and millionaires alike from sleeping under railroad bridges.

Anyway, you might find some cultural feminists who think patriarchy should be replaced with matriarchy, but you’re not likely to find many classical liberal feminists who do. And if you had a third hand you’d say on the other other hand real radical feminists, the branch Twisty Faster and I seem to be most drawn to, disagrees with many priorities of both cultural and classical-liberal feminism.

And the point of highlighting such contrast-y schools of feminism? You’d probably already worked this out for yourself but if you were one of those people who said you disagreed with “Teh Feminists” you’d almost certainly talking through your hat since, in fact, large groups of feminists often disagree with feminists!

Update: Just to be clear, by highlighting divergent schools of thought (cultural vs liberal) or even greater divergence between individuals within such schools (Ann Althouse vs. Renegade Evolution vs. Hillary Clinton within liberal feminism) is not intended as a criticism! And if one is going to find that much diversity outside of academia it would be a little startling if there was less diversity within academia. Furthermore, since it’s entirely possible I wasn’t clear about this earlier, with so much diversity within the topic it seems extraordinarily difficult for anyone less closed-minded than Mike Huckabee to disagree with all of either feminism or women’s studies.

Photo by Flickr user amyj67074. Used under a Creative Commons license.

To bleg: “A blog entry consisting of a request to the readers, such as for information or contributions. A portmanteau of ‘blog’ and ‘beg’. Also called ‘Lazyweb.’” This post includes a request for information from readers, preceded by an explanation of why I’m interested. —fl]

So… Y’know, one of the areas of “men’s studies” I’m trying to get a grip on is something Sulamith Firestone mentions a couple of times, though only obliquely, in Dialectics of Sex. She implies strongly that pretty much everything we think of as “masculine” was… sort of made up by guys like Norman Mailer, Earnest Hemmingway, maybe Dashell Hammet and Ian Flemming. (If so then I might throw in John Wayne, John Ford, and couple of other Hollywood personalities as inventing “manliness” as well.)

It’s certainly the case that you don’t see so much discussion what is or isn’t masculine in the 18th or 19th Century. And when we do it’s often got a lot to do with the ordinary seven-deadly-sin sort of vices than the sort of highly circumscribed behavior (can’t do this, don’t do that, don’t be caught dead near a quiche) stuff that started showing up in the 20th Century. Not to mention that while there was misogyny out the wazoo before the Mailer/Hemmingway/Ford set cranked up, it seemed more wary and way less horny. (For instance until, say, World War One most literate American and English men believed that ejaculating “as many as” ten times a year would lead to a depletion of precious bodily fluids and thus insanity and and early grave! And that meant ejaculation during heterosexual sex, masturbation was supposed to be infinitely worse.)

Anyway I could be just totally extrapolating that from Firestone’s work where she never intended to put it in. But I’d love to hear more about it if it’s true. And, of course, if it’s true then it would be pretty critical for developing men’s consciousness to know. Examination of “femininity” as an affectation seem pretty productive in feminism. I’m pretty sure discussions of “masculinity” would be productive as well.

Here’s a sort-of example of sort of what I’m talking about: There’s a reference in, I think, Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff to NASA publicity flacks running classes for first-generation astronauts who were, almost by definition, about as manly as it gets in America. The lessons? How not to drink, cuss, spit, or ogle babes? A little. But also… how to lower their voices, how if they had to put their hands on their hips at all to put them thumbs back like a cowboy instead of thumbs forward like women in kitchen appliance ads. In other words they were taking already brave, accomplished, and already exceptional men and applying this veneer of “masculinity” over them because, it was felt, it wasn’t enough for them to be heros, they had to pretend to be even bigger ones. Know what I mean?

Anyway, here’s where the begging comes in. Can anyone better versed in gender studies help me with links, clues, or other further readings into anything about this idea that masculinity as we know it has been more invented recently than inherited from time immemorial? I’d appreciate it.

[Final note: this post was triggered in part by yet another post by Hugo Schwyzer who was in turn inspired by the recent death of arch-masculinist Norman Mailer. —fl]