I am reposting this item in marywollstonecraft because readers have felt it casts light on male responses to feminism. I first posted this item under my own name some months ago, in response to a discussion in Amy Tuteur's blog that was going on at the time. About a month ago, Kellylark read it and asked me to repost it. Cassandra Woolf read the repost and asked me to post it here. Readers may find the discussion threads on the two other postings of interest also: here and here. Male readers thought that the first posting would bring a storm down on my head from female readers. This didn't happen, and the response of feminist readers to this post is at least as interesting as the post itself.
Matthew DeCourseyThe recent thread on pornography begun by Amy Tuteur is generating more heat than light. Now that I have appointed myself Open Salon's historian of socialism, perhaps I have some credibility for shedding some historical light on this issue.
I suspect that some of what's going on in that thread is a reopening of old wounds. The average age at Open Salon seems to be pretty high, and that means that most of us remember the early to mid-eighties pretty vividly.
In 1984, or thereabouts, I was in a bookstore browsing, and I ran across Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. The Penguin edition had a solid black cover. In red and white letters on that background were these words: "Rape is a crime committed by all men against all women." I wondered how anyone could say that, and I bought the book. It was a horrifying catalogue of rape in a wide range of contexts. However, the assertion on the cover was based on nothing more than this: (1) Men benefit from patriarchy. (2) Women's fear of rape reinforces patriarchy. Therefore (3) men benefit from rape committed by other men. I remember her words: "Rapists do myrmidon service" for the male population at large.
I asked a female friend about this, and she supported Brownmiller. I asked her how the collective guilt of men affected her in her own life, and she came up with a minor example of rudeness from her boyfriend.
"How is that rape?" I asked.
"He was trying to show that he's the man, that he's in charge," she said.
I lapsed into a baffled silence.
Another time, I was having dinner with some friends, all women, about five of them. They got to talking about rape, and how they would like to castrate any man who raped them, or any woman.
"If it weren't for the fear of punishment," said one, "men would rape."
I was, well, offended.
I regret that I took the whole thing as seriously as I did. I should have left Brownmiller's book on the shelf, dismissing the whole assertion as outrageous and insupportable stupidity. I'm sure the book had positive functions, particularly in the validation of women who had suffered sexual violence, but in my life it functioned as hate propaganda.
In those days, "the male gaze" was itself already rape. Unless you walked around with your eyes shut (or were capable of never feeling any sexual desire), you were, in the jargon of the time, "always-already" a rapist.
It's harsh stuff. I recognize that it had roots in women's harsh experience. I recognize, too, that feminism has never been a very unified creature, and a lot of very positive things were happening there too.
Still, for those of us old enough to remember the time, I think the scars are there, and men as well as women have a right to be a little heated on the issue.
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Comments
I am not a "scholastic" feminist. I didn't study it, I don't read others' treatises about it (and with Brownmiller's example, that seems like a good thing). I came to feminism by living it, unintentionally at first, but with vigor once I realized that most women didn't have my advantages, and were being taken advantage of on every level at every turn.
I cannot and will not demonize "men" in the pursuit of my feminism. Specific men, yes! But sweeping generalizations, be it from the 60's, 70's 00's that seek to cast all men in the most negative light will always turn me away. I was raised by a feminist man before there ever was such a thing. And that is what it takes. Equality-minded men and women raise sons and daughters who respect the opposite sex. There is no fear, and there is no pre-judgement. There is simply respectufl co-existence and an innate knowledge that we are equal beings.
There is a place for the scholars in feminism, but not for any that start with an exaggerated premise like this one, and so many others do.
That's what I (not too deeply) think.
Rated.
I am delighted you posted. I hope you share your thoughts regularly. I will comment more later.
Too many women rather conveniently forget they played the major role in raising sons and need to acknowledge their own responsibility for the perpetuation of sexism.
To me the issue with Brownmiller is not that her work is scholarly, but rather that it is not scholarly enough. One needs to think seriously about issues of evidence, and she doesn't. As I read the book at the time, she builds up a tremendous amount of evidence about particular occurrences of rape, then generalizes, not from them, but from a priori principles.
I studied feminist literary theory as a graduate student in the late eighties (and yes, I was the only male there). I read some interesting things (Coppelia Kahn, if you're out there I love you). At the same time, I think there were some problems with the way arguments were built up. The first thing we read was Louis Althusser's essay on "interpellation" from the anthology called Lenin and Philosophy. I thought, "So we're dealing with feminism, and we're depending on a man who killed his wife?" He presents an understanding in that essay on the formation of the subject in language. To my mind, it makes the subject too passsive, at the mercy of the Ideological State Apparatuses. We can actually reflect on what people tell us, on what we read and listen to. One of the things that happened was that people trusted this model, and looked for elements of "discourse" to explain every evil in human attitudes. Since they believed implicitly that every evil in behaviour must come from discourse somehow, they got very tendentious on what elements of discourse led to what behaviour. Acts in discourse came to seem the same as acts in the physical world. Hence the notion that a rude remark is the same as rape.
That should have led to mothers taking responsibility for the behaviour of sons. Actually, if taken to the logical conclusion, I think it would have led to excessive taking of responsibility on their part. As MW remarks, it didn't tend to. That was part of the muddle of the times.
Matt DeCoursey
Along with the appeal to discourse, I think there is a distinct Marxist undercurrent in academic feminism of the Brownmiller kind -- one that believes that power structures are self-conscious and self-perpetuating in a very deliberate way, in the sense that Marxism believed in class struggle and in the existence of 'evil' groups (the kulaki in Russia, or maybe the bourgeosie in the world at large) which had to be fought against, and would necessarily be defeated as the world evolved towards communism.
More attention needs to be paid to how much men actually suffered from the prevalence of gender stereotypes, and the text to which their 'prestige' and 'power' often translated into suffering in their personal lives. Freeing ourselves of these stereotypes is therefore not simply something to be done so that women can attain a fully human status. Men also need that.
Crimes of all kinds are committed, they are not themselves 'patriarchy'. I was mugged many times in my native country, I was physcially assaulted three times, and once I was raped (by current definitions, at least; I personally refuse the label for what happened to me). That caused also a lot of anger in me, and I certainly wanted to change something; but I know anger is not the right emotion to rely on when thinking about what to do. When being victimized, anger is a reasonable, expectable emotion that should be expressed; but be careful with what it makes you think, because it is not really a good guide to reality and/or how to change it.
If some men would say anything a feminist says is wrong, this is exactly because these men are angry at feminism, which they see as demanding too much. They're actually a good example of why anger harms more than it helps. SOME angry feminists also say that anything a man says is wrong or 'patriarchal' -- which is exactly the same sad mistake.
Let the volcano roar, but I wouldn't use it to think. The bad things you were told, about what you could or couldn't do -- they can be counter-argued and logically shown to be fallacious. If need be with the example of your own life.
The comment you've just made tends toward the "emotional filter" model: one needs to put out effort to think clearly despite emotion. I think there's obvious validity to that view. At the same time, there are times in life when emotion is essential to the perception of truth. That's what you go to the theatre for, it seems to me. To see truth as a whole person and not as a detached Sherlock Holmes figure. And that's one reason why I say that beauty relates to truth.
Penrose, I don't have a problem with the expression of anger, and I recognize that women need to express their anger. My problem with Brownmiller is that she deceitfully sets up her expression of anger as something that it's not. It's not a conclusion drawn carefully from data: it's expression of anger. Her anger has a real-world basis, but it is still anger, and not a reasoned argument. Her major conclusion does not flow from her evidence, and that's an ethical problem.
When I read the book, so many years ago, I recognized in my head that her major conclusion had no basis, but emotionally I couldn't pull it off. There was a lot of rhetoric in the air in those days about how "men just don't get it," and I didn't have enough confidence just to say, "What nonsense." I should have had. I wasn't mature enough.