I want to talk about how we talk sometimes about some men who talk about feminism

[ritaxis]

(I've been back almost a week, I have internet, but I am also jetlagged so I will only be gradually be catching up with reading everything you all wrote while I was having offline adventures, and also only gradually catching up on telling you about those adventures. Also, I have book news, but I will save that for later today).

I want to take note of, and respond to, a couple of trends I have noticed online the last week or so. Of course both of them have been around longer than that by a long shot, but now is when I want to talk about them.

The first one is this. A fellow, usually someone who makes their living from something publically geeky, will write about how he was doing something with his daughter and had a feminist insight. There will be some memorializing about how the activity in question resonates with his earliest and truest experiences as a boy and young man, how he dearly wishes to share this experience with his child, the degree to which he does, his deep love and admiration for his smart, strong, interesting daughter. There will be a crushing experience--no girl characters, someone saying something terrible to his daughter: the kinds of things girls experience in a gendered way (of course, I say pre-emptively, boys have crushing experiences, and even gendered crushing experiences, but it's not symmetrical, and that's the point). The father is appalled and furious that his daughter experienced this, and wants to let you know about this. Partly he wants to make a statement that he Gets It, partly he wants to speak to other men who might not get it and say "This is why I get it, and why you should to," and sometimes there's even a bit of "what is to be done," that is, a call for specific action or discussion.

The second one is a response. There are lots of different responses out there, many of which amount to "You lovely man! I am so glad you Get It now." But there's this other one that is "I am so tired of you men who only Get It when you have a personal stake in it. Where were you ten years ago before your daughter was born? All you're doing is posing to get praise. I don't buy it. You're self-absorbed, not feminist. I excoriate you."

Of course he's self-absorbed. He is a person who is writing about intimate personal and family experiences on the internet, frequently with adorable pictures of the daughter in question and/or his own smiling self. Seriously, that's not much of an accusation. And yes, of course he wants his readers to think he's brilliant and caring and forward-thinking. Again, not much of an accusation. But to say that his insight is worthless because it came on the heels of a personal experience is odd. Is it that his referencing his own family is to ignore the rest of the world of women and girls who suffer all these and more every day? Is it that some of us don't want fellows like him to stand over here with us?

I'm going to stop here for a second and wander down a side road in my mind. The very first man I heard day that any man with a daughter has to be a feminist was the fellow I married. He told people about looking at the world from this perspective, how he couldn't stand that people would limit his daughter's passage through the world. He was an imperfect feminist, too. He said things at times that he only later realized were awful. But I wouldn't say he suddenly became a feminist because of one of those experiences he talked about. He was developing into a feminist before I met him, and unlike many women I've known, wasn't reluctant to call himself one even around his most misogynist associates. I suspect that at least a large number of these men writing about their feminist insights with their daughters were like him, and the insight did not pop out of nowhere.

But that's a side trip. It's not the important thing. We're better off if the internet is chock full of conversion moments where men who Don't Get It become men who Get It and write impassioned personal pieces about it replete with cute photos and references to beloved cultural icons. We're better off if every self-absorbed man on the internet decides he's a feminist now because he has some shocking personal experience. These men vote: they spend money: they talk to other men: they even talk to men I can't stand to be in the same room with. No, you don't need to respect them more than the woman who has spent her life fighting the good fight at every turn and getting beat for it. But why spend your bile on them? We have actual enemies in this world, and they are better organized than to attack the person who wishes to give them support.

Comments

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, yes. What you say here, how you witness here, is exactly right.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, yes. Thank you for saying this. I vented some spleen and now the Really Truly Feminists are yelling at me. Whatever.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed1

This morning I listened while el V spent a precious 50 minutes instructing an entirely ignorant and clueless young woman, who doesn't speak Spanish, who had landed a terrific opportunity, that of interviewing for the radio station where she's just a lowly anything anyone wants her to do, a Cuban percussionist who is playing as part of the incredible Latin Jazz festival that was kicked off by that Harlem Jazz Museum exhibit that el V's done so much work on.

She knows fracking NOTHING. She works at a jazz radio station. Her ignorance is astounding about everything.

He gave her a list of questions, explained all sorts of things about what means to be a Cuban musician born and bred and trained there, from family to religion. He advised her, that if she wanted to continue working on the Jazz tip, to learn Spanish, because, what is happening here in NYC this week, between the Harlem Museum and Lincoln Center, that is bringing together programs and events from the African American side (Wynton of course) and Chucho Valdés, means that things are changing, and Latin jazz, particularly Cuban, is now being recognized finally, as part of the Great Tradition, and there's just going to be more of this.

He gave her remedial EVERYTHING.

When she signed off, he said, "Those of us who in are positions of knowledge as with the history of slavery, Cuba, you name it, it's our job, our obligation, to be forever teaching 101. Because new people are always going to be coming up. If it matters to you, you teach them and encourage them to keep learning."

That's the point of what we do. Explaining over and over to people who still haven't learned it, that the Civil War happened because the slaveholding states were determined to expand the territory for slavery, not because the Union invaded to take their slaves away. That indeed the Civil War was fought about slavery, and so on and on and on, for the rest of our lucky lives.

That's what I was thinking of while reading you in that other place and how other people were responding.

Love, C.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this story. It will affect how I react to this in the future.

I hope the young woman was eager to learn.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, yes. Those with the knowledge have the responsibility to keep informing the new learners. We learned from someone else, after all.

And sometimes, in the process of explaining, we also end up learning new perspectives ourselves.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

The thing is, teaching is teaching, and somebody is always having to teach most people about most things.

Just because all of us know the alphabet, doesn't mean the alphabet no longer needs to be taught.

Because I know how to make bread doesn't mean that most people among my social circles do -- just as where I grew up most women did know how to make bread, but it still had to be taught.

We don't think there is anything wrong with having to start with a and b when comes to, say, knitting, or electronics, or the alphabet, even. We don't despise those who have discovered the joys of gardening and guitar playing, and we do applaud them wishing to learn to higher level. So why should feminism be different? Or any other social justice issues?

The thing is that once some women got what they thought they wanted out of feminism, just like some of us thought we now had civil rights for a diversity of people, etc., the assaults on all progressive issues and achievements kept going, but we didn't keep teaching. And now see where we are. Feminists are not in charge. We have a rape culture for fun and entertainment, while reproductive information and rights and access to care and medications are so sharply curtailed in many places they essentially don't exist.

Shall we ever learn from our mistakes?

Love, C.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Agreed. But how do we best communicate this need to those who feel that people should implicitly understand feminist issues and not be taught?

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Ask them if they know another language besides the one they were born into speaking, and if they find out they need to learn Spanish, who do they think would be the best teacher, and how would they respond if they asked for Spanish instruction and were told, "But you should already know Spanish since about 470 million people speak it as a native language. Where the eff have you been?"

And if they get all huffy and bitchy, classify 'em as trolls and ignore them ever more. You have better things to do.

Love, C.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Great. Thanks!

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

I do believe there are trolls and so on, like the MRAs, who will derail, strawman, etc. feminist commentary and women to death -- and maybe literally, or would like to.

But we can see those guys very easily for what they are and not feed them -- if possible. We also have the right to intensely dislike and / or despise them, one would think!

Love, C.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Professional jealousy sublimated into political disagreement.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's a bit of that, too.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Could be. I've thought of less sympathetic interpretations too, but I don't know these people.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

There's this today at the WaPo:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2014/09/19/geeks-have-become-their-own-worst-enemies/?hpid=z4

it's about geek culture per se, but it applies to this too, in the context of fandom and social justice, particularly feminism, it seems -- or racism too -- so much outrage, for instance about The Economist's anonymous review of Baptist's book, but how many of those outraged have actually read either the review or the book, either before or after?

[ " In a debate on the nature of geek culture at its present juncture published earlier this week, my friend Frederick deBoer wrote what I think is a succinct and important summary of one of the more dismaying trends in cultural conversation today: the inability of people who love what is now the dominant culture to recognize that their interests have gone from marginal to hegemonic. “My fear is not merely that the geeks will never come to acknowledge their triumph, as comfortable as they are in their self-professed victimhood,” deBoer argued. “I fear too that we have come to so thoroughly associate fandom with grievance that the two are now inextricable. That, I suspect, is the long-term consequence of the rise of the geeks: that we no longer know how to enjoy art without enjoying it against others.” " ]

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thank you for writing this. I hate seeing people punished for saying they've learned something.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

I dislike people who pretend they've always known something when previously they had believed and preached just the opposite. Almost all the pro pundits who get paid the really big bux are like that. Most of them should have been fired and never re-hired for what they wrote and blathered in the run-up to Iraq as they ran around with fingers in their ears yelling WMD WMD WMD!!!!

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

There is something else, something I see now that I never saw when younger.

When younger, at, say, faculty parties, when it was time for the kids to go to bed, the faculty husband's wife would disappear for a long time with the kids, settling them, reading stories, etc., until they went to sleep. She'd come back to a party in full drunken roar, from a very different place. She also felt very left out.

These days, we go to a gathering where there are kids, and the dad's a pro of something other, anything from professor to say, David Simon's music director, HE is working in the kitchen when we get there, his wife is probably still out doing her profession, and later, he goes upstairs with the kids, to settle them for bed, while his wife catches up with the party.

The first times I witnessed this, I couldn't help but compare and contrast how things would have been at his house 20 - 30 years ago -- it would have been like the faculty parties of my youth. That's how much things have changed in many places. And these men wouldn't be doing all this fathering now if other fathers hadn't made that kind of fathering considered the right thing, what a MAN is supposed to do, i.e. cool.

Love, C.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Have you heard of Tetlock's work on how bad pundits are at predicting, and how little the public notices?

The last paragraph mentions who made the best predictions about Iraq.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Twenty-six years ago, when my son and I attended an indoor park cooperative for toddlers, there was one stay-at-home father who attended with his daughter. Most of the women shunned him, but a handful of us encouraged him to continue--and we took over the leadership of the park at that point. While politics was in part a factor, the reality was that there were feminists on both sides of that divide (supporting vs not supporting).

My husband has always had a nurturing side, and he influenced our son to be very similar. They both enjoy cooking and I'm very happy to let them do that (canning and baking, on the other hand....they're happy to let me do that).

Huh. I just realized I have material for a post of my own.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

You do!

I want to see it.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

I will try to do it later on tonight.

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

My dad hasn't Gotten It despite having three daughters, so when other guys talk about how having daughters caused them to Get It, I can't really hold it against them. It's not like that's a universal experience.