Yikes, this post has been in draft for a week. Guess that either means it’s a tough topic, or I’m having a tough week. Bit of both, I’m afraid.

So many people have blogged on this Kyle Payne thing–Ren’s got them all listed in her sidebar, so you can go there if you don’t know what I’m talking about. So I just didn’t really think I had anything else to say that hadn’t already been said.

But, well, here it goes again…ye olde “Can men be feminists?” question.

Sometimes I am really sorely tempted to say “no.”

I mean, look yet again at a man who claimed to be such a feminist, a radical feminist, and who dedicated his life to feminism–yet molested a passed-out girl.

And of course on the one hand no one is responsible for his actions but him, and it’s ridiculous to assume so, and on the other hand, well, enough of the women I know have copped to feeling squicked out by the same overzealous ‘male feminist’ types that I have to wonder if there isn’t something to be learned from it after all.

I will never again be with a man who is at all disdainful of feminism–did that for two years and it was one of the dumbest choices I ever made. But at the same time, I doubt I’d be happy with a man who was constantly trying to be a better feminist than me. Because I’m a woman–it’s my lived experience. So, um, you don’t get to tell me that I’m wrong about it, okay?

And I don’t trust–flat out don’t trust–people who deny their sex drives over and over again but like to obsess about them at the same time. Let’s face it, if you’re that unconcerned about sex you wouldn’t be talking about it so much. I don’t like baseball–I don’t spend hours going into detail about how much I hate baseball, how disgusting baseball is, etc. I just don’t bother with it.

So, I mean…can men be allies? Absolutely, and I don’t want to bother knowing any who aren’t. But when it comes to feminism, sometimes I really want to tell men to do more listening and less talking. Let us decide what we feel oppressed by, what we feel injured by, what we feel hurt by. Let women tell you what men can do to help them.

I mean…how many people have been in fucked-up manipulative relationships? Yeah, thought so. And what was the first thing those people did to keep you controlled? Tell you they knew better than you did, right? Tell you they had it all figured out and you just had to listen to them and you’d be happy, right?

Purtek has a post up about whether men have a place in sexual assault centers. And she’s right, of course, that negative attitudes and other such problems can come from any angle, male or female. (And as she said, I won’t get into here the giant topic of transgendered women in these centers, either, or the fact that men do face sexual assault and rape.)

I think what I find more red-flagging in this situation isn’t that this guy was working in a sexual assault center (though that’s certainly disgusting, and I feel for anyone who was ever counseled by this guy). It’s that he seemed to have the need to endlessly self-aggrandize his own involvement–while simultaneously pretending that he was being oh so humble.

Here’s the thing. If your time is mostly spent talking about yourself, you probably aren’t helping anyone. I know this can sound like rank fucking hypocrisy on a blog, especially one where I usually use personal experience as a jumping-off point but: My blog is not my activism. My writing is not my activism. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes not.

I value men’s voices and have not the slightest separatist tendency in my body. As I commented on Purtek’s post, some of the first people I would (and do) turn to in a crisis are men, men who’ve been there for me when everything else was falling apart.

I also hate when feminism is used to start telling people ‘Ur Doin It Rong’ and to limit women’s choices or make them feel bad about their experiences and what makes them happy. That is Not Liberating in the slightest. (Liberating–a word both under- and over-used…the subject of another post, perhaps.)

When it’s a self-proclaimed feminist man who is telling women how to do feminism, well, that gets my hackles up faster than a Joe Lieberman interview. I don’t care how many books you’ve read, you’re not going to know what oppresses me, so please stop now, kthanx?

If you want to be a feminist, you have to listen to women. If you want to help women, volunteer. Donate some money. But most of all, listen. Be an ally. Be a friend.

Posted: July 19th, 2008 under Feminism.
Comments: 2

Calling Bill Richardson “disloyal” for not endorsing Hillary Clinton is the same BS crony politics that we’re so used to. See, the implication that Richardson somehow owes the Clintons something for making him Secretary of Energy is patently screwed up. That was years ago, and Richardson and Hillary Clinton have differing views on several issues that have gone on in oh, the past eight years?

Besides that, I thought that when a president appointed a cabinet, he chose people based on their skills and talents, not on whether they’d later endorse his wife for the same position he already held? I thought that our political system was a meritocracy, not one based on nepotism and cronyism? Anyone remember Brownie and his “heckuva job”?

Where were the calls of disloyalty when Bill Richardson chose to run against Hillary Clinton in the first place? I mean, that seems like some serious disloyalty there, unless they thought Richardson would make a good straw man for Clinton run against and be gracious in defeat and roll out the red carpet for her when she was ‘inevitable.’

Too bad that at this point, she’s anything but inevitable and every endorsement that goes Obama’s way is one more superdelegate she won’t be getting to overrule the will of the actual voters.

All these calls of disloyalty rankle me about as much as the claim by the president of NOW NY that Ted Kennedy was somehow betraying all women when he endorsed Barack Obama.

Funny, I never thought of Teddy as a great friend to women everywhere, but then I never thought of Bill Clinton that way either. And I didn’t consider it a personal betrayal when he endorsed the candidate that I’ve supported from the beginning because I thought he was better on issues that mattered to me: the war, human rights, foreign relations, crime and drug policy, etc.

The idea that the Clintons somehow are owed something by everyone they gave a job in Bill’s administration just rubs me the wrong way. Aren’t we fighting to throw out an administration based on sweetheart deals for old friends?

And how can Clinton surrogates on one hand claim that the superdelegates–and even the pledged delegates!–aren’t required to vote for who they are pledged to, and on the other hand throw a hissy fit when a former administration official endorses their rival?

Entitlement. Screw that.

Posted: March 29th, 2008 under Bullshit, Politics.
Comments: none