Thanks for getting this out there, Dave. You've been hitting the books hard, and it shows.
One quibble: I'm pretty clear (and got the dubious opportunity to explain in about six different places,*sigh*) that violence against women is as old as dirt, as you point out. What's new about this, is that, at least in the modern era, violence against women has statistically been one-on-one, overwhelmingly committed at home by someone the woman knew.
Apart from street crime, the main exception to this is in time of war, when violence against women takes on a different character. To wit: it moves into public spaces, and is committed by strangers, often in groups, often against women in groups.
So the fact that these incidents are now occurring in public, and committed by strangers against multiple women, disturbs me. This is the MO of wartime violence -- the behavior of soldiers, not garden-variety domestic abusers. Which raises the question: Are these guys, on some level, moving onto a war footing? And if so, why, and for what, and against whom?
And there's a second level to this, too. In some kinds of armed conflict there's a mutual agreement that women are non-combatants. In other kinds, humiliating the other side's women is fair game. I'm not a soldier, and don't understand the contours of this distinction. But if we are moving to some kind of battlefield rule, it's clearly the latter one, and I'd like to understand the implications of that.
Same shit, weird new form, no clue what it all means.
I have only one major area of disagreement with your post, David: I think it puts too much responsibility for misogyny on Christianity. Christianity has certainly been the vehicle for misogyny in Western culture, but AFAIK Western misogyny has not been more toxic than that of Chinese culture, or Japanese, or Ancient Greece. In Western culture misogyny dresses in Christian clothes, but that doesn't mean Christianity causes (or caused) misogyny.
I don't know whether Hindu or Persian or Arabic or Egyptian literature features the kind of anti-woman rant that both ancient Greece and medieval Christianity produced. I don't recall such a rant in the Hebrew Bible, but there may be one in the Minor Prophets.
David,
I'll second what the previous poster said and add this: the witchcraft persecutions in Europe (c 1350-1700) were NOT always about religion.
AND not all of those persecuted for witchcraft were women. In some parts of Europe, such as Russia, more MEN than women were branded as witches.
AND in some parts of central Europe, there were rigid laws in place to protect citizens from unwarranted prosecution. Those who accused but could not provide proof of witchcraft were often prosecuted (and some were put to death).
I also like women, always have, and always will. I also agree that the violent against women is nothing new and is certainly apparent in Fascist behavior. However, alas...there is nothing here outside of Western/Christian civilization. Nothing is said of "radical" Islam, where hatred of women is rampant (despite hiding behind excuses of "tradition"). As the so-called "radical" aspect of Islam spreads through out Europe and appears on the cultural radar in America, how long will (what passes for) the Left remain silent?
I don't think it's "off topic" to express concern regarding all violence against women, whether from surly gun collectors or from those to whom Allah speaks directly.
We live in a sick, addicted society. Sex is used to sell everything and it has twisted all of us to a greater or lesser extent. Especially evident is the current macho hysteria of the ruling class and their cronies. Every issue is posed as wimpy or macho and it is obvious that those who cry, "Macho!" most are probably the ones with real problems in their gender identities.
I keep on remembering a great science fiction story by James Tiptree Jr, Raccoona Sheldon, Jane Sheldon (all the same person) called "The Screwfly Solution." You can read the whole story online at http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/...n/
sheldon1.html
As wikipedia says, "The story begins with an exchange of letters and news clippings between Allan, a scientist working on parasite eradication in Colombia, and his wife Anne at home in the U.S., concerning an epidemic of organized murder of women by men. Although some scientists suspect a biological cause for this sexually selective insanity, the murderers feel it is a natural instinct and have constructed elaborate misogynistic rationalizations for it, including a new religious movement. Allan himself becomes affected, and tries to resist his violent impulses. In the end, Anne, pursued by an entire society bent on "femicide", discovers the source and motivation behind the plague."
Interesting. I was just thinking about the Malleus a couple of weeks ago:
In the case of [the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum] Kramer and Sprenger, the analysis is complicated by the manner in which they produced the text. Much of it was reportedly the result of their inquisition and the methods used. To put it bluntly, a good part of it was probably produced by persons under duress, torture in other words. So here you have an unusual collaborative process. Those who are tortured attempt to tell the torturers what they want to hear, but that in itself adds yet another projective layer into the process.
Jung seldom writes of the “collective unconscious” as the product of torture, but there it is. Indeed, the folk process in all its forms requires more psychic energy than is required to merely dream or view an inkblot. Communication must occur and the impetus for communication is often more violent than we’d like to think.
The book itself is ugly and humorless, a compendium of misogynistic sadomasochistic projection. It is also a record of tales of the witch inquisition itself, and, given our own beliefs that people cannot actually raise hailstorms by pissing into a trench or fly through the air on demonic power, the record of persons being burned at the stake for these activities does cause revulsion. In such cases, one tends to cling to the hope that the entire matter was entirely fictional.
Generally speaking, witches in the Malleus seem to spend an ungodly amount of time raising hailstorms, roasting and eating babies, and copulating with the devil or his incubi and succubae. Interestingly, there don’t seem to have been many homosexual witches; Lucifer apparently didn’t tumble to that bit of fun until modern times, or maybe the monks didn’t consider it to be as essentially sinful as women as such.
In any case, the Malleus virtually demands the classic Freudian interpretation of repressed sexuality getting all gnarly, then escaping in all sorts of projective behavior. Our recent dance with “repressed memory” and “Satanic Ritual abuse” contains practically all of the important parts of the fantasies contained in the Malleus, right on down to the baby eating. It’s worth noting that such fantasies play a big role in the psychopathology of anti-Semitism as well, and _Protocols of the Elders of Zion makes an interesting companion piece to the Malleus Maleficarum_. If I wanted to write a really sick and twisted horror novel, those two are where I’d start.
First, an aside: why do we tend to describe social phenomena such as these based on what happened to the victim rather than what motivated the perpetrator? Calling this "misogyny" does nothing to advance our understanding of the phenomenon.
Second, another aside: why do we seem to assume that the social subjugation of women is motivated by "hate" ("misogyny" means the "hatred of women") while we seem to assume that the the violent crime against gays is motivated by"fear" ("homophobia," in common parlance, means the "fear of homosexuals")? Yet we call the latter a "hate crime"? (Sorry for the "Jack Handy" moment, but how we use language can say a lot about us.)
Now, to the heart of the matter. I question whether we can understand the rise of fascism, "pseudo-fascism," "misogyny" or "homophobia" without acknowledging and understanding the dynamics of social power. I posit that social/political movements-- whether right-wing or left-wing-- are almost always targeted at those who believe they are disenfranchised, and that the leaders of such movements purposefully play on that feeling of disenfranchisement while promising ascendancy. In other words, the leaders of social/political movements ALWAYS promise power to their followers. While I would not consider gun-nuttery to be a social/political movement, I do believe that the same issue lies at its core: a gun is the very symbol of the power over life and death.
So why have social/political movements such as Nazism, Christian Fundamentalism, etc. targeted women and minorities? Because women and minorities are viewed as weak, either physically (in the case of women) or politically (as in the case of minorities, who by definition lack the political power to fight back). It is quite simple, and effective, to demonize a weak "opponent" to create a "strong" straw man that you motivate your base to destroy.
While such social/political movements do NOT explain the "onslaught of damaged males inflicting violence on women" (an alleged phenomenon that, based on the examples presented by Mrs. Robinson, I question the depth and breadth of), I do agree that they spring from the same place: a sense of powerlessness. Blithe comments from folks like BlackBloc ascribe the actions of these men to their anger at losing their power, but that assumes they had power in the first place. White males in the lower and lower-middle classes never had such power and never will. Yet they are painted with the same brush as the rich white males who they believe sold them out. (Think of it this way: from a purely economic perspective, there were a lot of incentives for the wealthy elite to welcome the notion of more than doubling the size of the available workforce; concepts of supply and demand counsel that the effective cost of employing the workforce will go down significantly; therefore, query where the resistance to women in the workforce came from.)
The sad fact is that people who feel relatively powerless tend to take their aggressions out only on those who they believe are weaker than they are because they don't believe that they can dominate anybody else. These defeated men-- and I don't know what else you can call somebody who goes out on a killing spree with the intention of killing themselves at the end of it-- don't have the courage to attack their true oppressors, so they prey on the weakest in our society. By making this observation, I have no intention to excuse what these men have done, but I do think it is important to correctly characterize the crime for what it is: a crime of power and control. Rape was once characterized as a crime of passion, then as a crime of violence, and ,most recently, a crime of power and control. I think the analogy is apt.
In closing, a final aside: I know several men from the lower-middle and middle classes who have meted out their own justice on men they saw being violent to women. A recent incident that I am aware of involved a marine that I know who saw a fellow marine slap/punch his girlfriend in a bar. My acquaintance took the guy outside and beat the living crap out of the asshole for doing that, putting the asshole in the hospital. This type of male-on-male violence typically is chalked up to boys-being-boys and does not result in cries for men to "grow up," but it is out there, and it is very real. Now, you may say that all violence is wrong-- and, frankly, I am not a proponent of violence in any form-- but the point of this example is that there remains in our lower classes a strong AVERSION to male-on-female violence, one that results in immediate vigilante justice on the perpetrators of such violence. This should be viewed as a sign of hope: the people most susceptible to right-wing demagoguery maintain a values system that remains untouched by the hateful, divisive messages of these right-wing movements. From a political perspective, if we want to prevent the proliferation of "hate" movements, I'd argue that we should not be focusing on the aberrations that murder-suicides represent. Instead, we should be focusing on the addressing the underlying sense of powerlessness through progressive ideals and actions. The very same people who form the core of the current "conservative" movement once were progressive to the bone.
Please consider this possibility; the constant context of political discourse is this simple darwinian exercise; culture is the gender battleground for the control of conception. In war who benefits? Enemies share the desire to control thier women and subliminally, conception.
Interesting comment above, noting that western/christian societies are not the only ones with patterns of aggression and fear directed against women.
So, is there another side to the coin, societies where women are not seen as threats? Matriarchies, etc.? What does aggression look like in those, and how does it manifest - and against whom?
How much of this behavior is a toxic side effect of societal structures based on male strength/aggressive-defensive memes, and are there societies based on alternative memes?
You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion that has breathed upon this earth has degraded women.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I started to wonder about sin, and why so much sin in the Christian tradition falls on women, centers around women's bodies.
Elizabeth Wardle, Reflections from a Former Anti-Abortion Activist
Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on earth we find it tied to three dangerous dietary prescriptions: solitude, fasting and sexual abstinence
Friedrich Nietzsche
I've been saying for some years now that it amazes me how much recent political history can be described as an expression of threatened masculinity. It is, as you point out, a common historical pattern. I think, though, it has more to do with present circumstances than cultural history.
First, and foremost, the common christian sexual teachings which pervade US culture--not the dark ages history, things going on right now--do not provide a realistic model for sexual maturation. Both sexes, of course, are harmed by this, but men more than women are the sex inclined to respond to their difficulties with violence.
Second, men in our culture are taught they are lords of creation and very much resent the reality that there can only, ever be a small elite. In addition the model of masculinity our culture presents has been invalidated by technological and sociological change; not only have a great many men been pushed to the bottom of the heap, up has been moved.
Finally, both sexes sometimes resent sexuality as a thing which involves them intensely with other people in ways beyond their control. Men more than women, again, are apt to translate this resentment into violence.
These are none of them, I think, complex truths. But, oh, how hard to act on them!
I'm slightly surprised here - I never thought that femophopia was really a sexual thing per se. IMO, it's more about social hierarchy than sex.
In a typical authoritarian social structure, there's a reciprocity between members at various levels. Your superiors will protect you from harm, and in return you'll follow their lead.
Women are outside this hierarchy. There is no rule of reciprocity that stops your mother horrifically embarrassing you in front of your friends. If you offer your adoration to a girl in your class, there's no requirement for her to accept it.
Women lie outside the male power structure, and that gives them the freedom to behave in ways that cause pain for men, without suffering any consequences. For a man who relies on the quintessentially male hierarchy for protection and self-actualisation, that's an almost-unbearable undermining of his confidence.
There are only three major responses to this. Firstly, you can give up on the hierarchy entirely - as most liberal guys do. Secondly, you can just accept that said hierarchy doesn't encompass people who don't want to be in it - as a majority of conservatives do. Thirdly, you can do your best to force people to accept their place in your hierarchy. That road leads to femicide.
The reason I think femiphobia is a product of this mentality rather than of distorted sexual behaviours is that we see exactly the same effects when this authoritarian hierarchy meets other groups that lie outside it - gays, immigrants, jews, etc. They invade our territory, they take our jobs, they corrupt our children, they don't follow our rules. The same rhetoric every time.
Hate is motivated by fear.
Now *this* is blogging. Thank you so much for this.
I worry that too many people working against these patterns try desperately to make it All About one given explanation--one of the personal ones, one of the pathological ones, one of the systemic ones--and mash in all the rest to compensate, without acknowledging the basic truth that it's all of these, woven together and supporting and feeding each other. It just won't be so simple as to present its single neck for the cutting, when we want to solve the problem.
Wow. Great post. I feel a bit like after Thanksgiving Dinner - I'm stuffed, I'm uncomfortable, I'm going to be digesting for a while - but I've been well-nourished. Thank you.
Men MUST have control over everything that happens to them.
To be men.
And this assumption underlines so much of what men do when they don't acknowledge what an impossible task that is.
Men tend to not go to doctors, or admit to others they might need to lose weight or take better care of themselves, or admit their boss is unreasonable in their demands, or any of a million other things they don't have control over, yet think they should.
And when no one examines this assumption, denial is the only course. So the blame must lie elsewhere.
The marine example is someone expressing their view that men should control themselves, and if not, another man is the instrument of that control... a better man.
What is amazing is not how many men distort their minds under their impossible imperative, but how many do not.
Boys assume they can drive fast and jump off bridges without a possibility of bad consequences. Older, but no more mature, boys think they can take off to the woods with their gun and a bag of salt and be perfectly happy.
If there are elements in one's life a man cannot control, the immature man seeks to eliminate those elements.
I see it as a case of immaturity above all. However this mindset occurs (and there must be a great deal of hardwiring for it to be so pervasive) the cure is to be an adult.
That is the goal society should be striving toward.
Otherwise, we have someone who is not an adult in the White House, certain he can make things happen just by his wish.
I worry when it finally breaks through to him that this is not so. I don't think it has happened yet.
But we can be sure than when it does, it will not be HIS fault.
"The Nazi Revolution will be an entirely male event" was one of Hitler's most repeated phrases.
And that, I now realize, was Norman Spinrad's inspiration for the ending of The Iron Dream (or, technically, of Lord of the Swastika), when human reproduction is ended and replaced by cloning of Jaggar's SS.
Other than that, I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said, and said better, by previous commenters.
As the so-called "radical" aspect of Islam spreads through out Europe and appears on the cultural radar in America, how long will (what passes for) the Left remain silent?
If you are talking about the mistreatment of women in Islamic countries, or by Islamic men, the progressives have been trying to call attention to it for decades. For example, when the Taliban first got into power, the progressives tried to draw peoples' attention to how women were treated there - without much success - and progressives are still trying to draw attention to how women are treated in Afghanistan after the invation - again without much success.
These things are ignored by people in power, as long as they can't use it for their own purposes.
More and more women in Iraq is forced to adher to extremist interpretations of the Quran, yet when progressives point this problem out, they are accused of being pro-Saddam Hussein.
When is the last time we heard someone on the Right point out the very real problems women face in Pakistan? In Saudi Arabia?
Or, more close to the US, how about how women are treated in the militia movement? Among the people who believes that women should not be allowed to vote or speak out against their husbands?
Excuse me, if I am not impressed by your rant against the opression of women in Islamic countries, as long as they are not allied to us, and as long as you can use it as a pretext to keep Islamic people out.
Dave and all: If you want to look at a REALLY NASTY kind of fascist revolution go to Sweden RIGHT NOW. It's cracking up at
http://krigskronikan-2007.blogsp...orei-dvs-
r.html
where you can meet one of the most famous publishers in the BLACK SEPTEMBER REVOLUTION in Sweden. Act NOW, since this is a unique opportunity for all of us. Read my lips: NOW!
Sorry. I've been working around the clock for weeks now: english link is
http://thewarchronicle2007.blogs...still-
love.html
Your best comment ever, Griff. Lots of chewy goodness. I really liked the observation about taking weak opponents and turning them into strong straw men -- that happens a lot, now that you point it out, and I'm going to be looking out for it now.
Your comment about there being a few high-power males and a lot of low-power ones is obvious -- but, evidently, not to a lot of feminists, who have created their own Powerful Patriarchy straw man image without making this distinction (unless it suits them to have it both ways, which happens. A lot.).
Personally, I think it's time to re-visit chivalry. There's was a lot in that old code that was not great for women -- most notably, the way it perpetuated madonna/whore, and set it up so men could use their power as a protection racket -- but it's also our primary Western source for enforcing the idea that women are deserving of men's respect, and giving men tools to express that respect. Since we seem to be short on those ideals at the moment, it may be time to go back to the beginning and brush up a bit.
As a fairly high-status female, I'm aware as I move through the world that I have more power (money, education, etc) than many of the men I meet. And, yeah, I do sometimes get a backlash of resentment off lower-status men for that. Liberal latte women like me, in particular, seem to make working-class men cringe, often visibly. But, often, I find I can manage this by making an appeal to chivalry -- I'll treat you like a gentleman as long as you treat me like a lady. They usually respond very well to this, because it's a ritualized way of interacting that gives them a big stake in making sure the encounter goes well; and it leaves their dignity intact. Serving me ennobles them, rather than demeans them; and we end up with good feelings all around.
With men who match me more closely in education or status, I'll drop back to the egalitarian peer-to-peer mode, because we both know how to interact that way. Although I've also found this approach useful with very high-status conservative men as well: the code demands that they refrain from using their superior power to harm me, and if I signal that I expect them to honor that, they usually do.
Sometimes, low-status men will try to flatten things out with high-status women by making really crass sexual overtures as a way of expressing sexual dominance. Yuck. Chivalry didn't hold with that, either.
Another piece of the code is that it calls men to commit themselves to something larger, which seems to be something a lot of men have a very deep need for (it's what's at the heart of the Grail Myth and other Hero's Journeys). In a lot of cultures, the difference between the men and the boys is that the men have made that commitment -- to a woman, a family, a craft, their country, God, or whatever. Most of the screwed-up men I've known in my life didn't have that focal point for their energy, and so they ended up either turning it in on themselves or lashing out at society in general. For the ones who got unscrewed, it happened when they finally found that focus. This is why it's not always a completely bad idea to send confused boys off to the military (commitment to country). Conversely, frats and gangs are so dangerous because, despite lip service to Old U or the 'hood, they're vast pools of young-male energy that doesn't any focus beyond self-gratification.
(more)
(continued)
Chivalry also demanded that men police themselves, which Griff also mentions. There will always be men who take their control and power issues out on women. Given the physical power differentials, relatively few women are in a position to respond in any other way save surviving the encounter as best we can, and then taking the matter to the cops and courts. But if men feel they've got a duty to uphold a standard of behavior, and step up to remind other men that they are accountable to that standard, it seems possible to me that we'd have a safer, gentler society for everyone.
We all know those guys. My dad was one, and I'm married to one. They're the ones who talk down the belligerent drunk, who take the undisciplined young guy aside and (in a very friendly way) review the expected rules of behavior, who step outside the restaurant in a shady neighborhood "for some air," just to keep an eye on a dark parking lot while a woman they don't even know walks to her car. I've heard a lot recently from feminists who seem to feel that this kind of behavior is "power-over," and that when men do it, they are somehow making a dominance display that automatically disempowers women. They are quite convinced of this. And I'm quite convinced they're wrong.
I don't know whether having grown up with this makes me more insightful, or more myopic, or maybe some of both. But I do know I don't experience it that way at all. What I'm seeing are men who are engaged with and invested in the social order, and expressing their commitment to it (in part) by maintaining its boundaries and protecting it against harm. I think this desire to contribute to the common enterprise is psychologically healthy for men -- which is to say, I tend to mistrust those who don't seem to have this community feeling; and I think feminist discouragement of these noble impulses in both men or boys has created some pretty unforutnate unintended consequences.
I also think that men who are prone to misbehavior are more likely to take correction to heart when it comes from other men than they are from women -- or, possibly, even from institutions like the courts. Men who are conscious of hierarchy (which includes the kind of men who'd take their shit out on women) are going to be more responsive to higher-status men telling them, in no uncertain terms, that This Is Not OK (and we're going to make life unpleasant if you keep it up.)
I realize that in saying all this, I'm making myself a target. There is no shortage of people (I know, I've heard from them all in the last few days) who think that there are no salient differences between men and women. But most of America has heard that argument, and rejected it. Their experience says otherwise. I think men are different, and that we've got a stark choice between addressing those differences in ways that are either constructive to society, or ignoring them (which we've largely been doing) and allowing them to become a destructive force.
Something that's brushed on here is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and however I prod at it I can't get it to fall over:
Anger (which can evolve into hate under long-standing conditions) largely comes from an individual being denied what they feel they deserve.
I'm not sure what to -do- with that observation, even if it does end up holding water. I wouldn't want to say to anyone "you -don't- deserve more," for obvious reasons. But I wonder if it's useful for anything.
This discussion of mysogyny seems to be overlooking a basic fact: men are sexually attracted to women, and many feel powerless to do anything about it. Even men who are themselves attractive, or who have powerful, confident personalities, find themselves tongue tied around attractive women. Humans, especially male humans, have an instinctive desire for order and control, and most men at some point in their lives feel frustrated by their inability to control/predict/influence their relationships with women. Not dangerous or violent frustration of course - but frustration. Inability to act on a crush. Inability to woo a woman. Inability to repair a failing relationship. Love is something that even the most powerful and controlling men in the world cannot control.
Put that into the context of a society where female sexuality is celebrated and displayed everywhere. Inability to attract a sexual partner in a culture that is loaded with powerful images of sexual women is FRUSTRATING. I think most men would agree that the longer they are sexually frustrated, the less rational they are about dealing with it. Men masturbate and view pornography on a level that is not even remotely comparable to women. After a man has masterbated hundreds of times to fantasies based on thoroughly unattainable images of women in pornography, they can become very very frustrated.
So how does a male reconcile the problem of something that is so powerfully irresistable, yet absolutely unattainable? Their sexual frustration becomes anger directed at these "sluts" who "tease".
While Hitler was publicly making strong anti-feminine statements, privately he was begging Eva Braun to kick him in the groin. This could be seen as a control freak profoundly frustrated by his inability to control his own sexual desires and needs.
Jon: I agree. I don't think anyone denies that men have lost status, respect, earning power, and validation in the last several decades.
Old radicals know that equality feels like oppression to those who are losing the power. There is, no doubt, a lot of that kind of necessary adjustment going on as women and minorities take on privileges that once only belonged to white men. There's nothing for that but hoping these guys can adjust, and raising our sons to have more realistic expectations.
But the equality shift is further complicated by a national economic decline that started almost exactly when feminism did (early 70s), and also eroded white male power. Women are getting the blame for that, though they had nothing to do with it; the two are very closely commingled.
But, apart from gender politics and economics, there's also been a culture-wide loss of respect and validation for men -- something that I don't think was necessary, and is really hurting us all. Men can validate and respect women without taking anything away from themselves (in fact, per my chivarly argument, this can be ennobling act for men). And women can validate and respect men without giving up any of their own power, as well (and, in my experience, fully empowered women often do). We all want to be seen, and respected, and acknowledged as human beings. In my observation, this experience can be amplified -- at least for straight people -- when you're feeling that acceptance from the other gender. This what I think we've lost, and our entire social contract between men and women has frayed as a result.
It's also left men without any place in the culture where they do get respect and validation. The workplace doesn't reward them: bosses treat them like shit, and the role of provider isn't what it used to be. Women won't respect them (and, too often, blame them). Media images of fatherhood make them look like buffoons. The upshot is that there's too little reward for engaging with society at all, which is, in my humble opinion, why we're seeing all these men drift away, and create these weird little subcultures where they can, at least for a while, feel OK and powerful and worthy of respect.
When I talk about disengagement, this is what I mean. It's not healthy for any of us. We need these guys back in the game.
The vast majority of violent feelings against women is a mis-placed desire for revenge for circumcision.
I say mis-placed because women very often have no control, or are never asked about whether they want to see their sons mutilated.
Blame the doctors, blame the fathers. Don't blame women for this crime.
Please consider this possibility; the constant context of political discourse is this simple darwinian exercise; culture is the gender battleground for the control of conception.
This is an extension of the fact that ALL religion is about controlling the reproductive behavior of women, usually to the benefit of men. And this is an extension of primitive, evolutionary baggage for males to "control their females" to prevent cuckolding by other males.
The "fear" and hatred of women plays on the same core issue.
A very probing analysis of fascist tendencies and misogyny, and a further enlightening discussion of gender roles and what I would call "transitional turmoil" as the social revolution implicit in feminism plays itself out.
On something of a tangent, I have noticed the specific targeting of "gun culture", and tending to speak of it in broad, monolithic terms. I understand the purpose - namely, that the most apparent and prevalent common culture amongst the _visibly_ gun-owning segment of the population, which is why it's only lightly troublign to see it represented so.
On the subject of a loss of power, though, and the fetishizing of guns as masculine tools, I think there's a point that is at least being slightly missed. With the exception of the automatic weapon ban, guns were not a major political issue for a long time in the United States. They were tools, and indeed, except for those who lived in older urban areas or recently immigrated, most individuals were a generation or one or two social contacts away from someone who had grown up with guns, socialized them as a tool rather than as a manifestation of power.
It wasn't until this chain of continuity was broken, with a large influx of people to the cities, mostly in the post-war period and the concommittant growth of the suburbs where firearms were not part of the standard culture. There is nothing wrong with this - in fact, it was a logical consequence of a rural-to-urban population shift. However, the timing of it coincided unfortunately with another major social change.
The rise of the modern suburban culture erased one other facet of rural living that I believe sits in amongst the civil rights movement, feminism, and much of the last 4 decades of political thought, both liberal and consevative. A libertarian might be prompted to call this a "statist drift", which is somewhat apt but a loaded statement. Prior to suburbanization, families and small communities were largely expected to care for their own needs in as much as possible. It was the suburban transition that changed this, with the rise of the nuclear family and increased population mobility. No longer were social networks enough to provide all of one's needs, so there was an increasing desire and eventually expectation that government would provide for things that only a generation before were provided for by communities, extended families and individuals.
The root from which this desire grew would be the New Deal, which was a cultural abberation, honestly, an extraordinary response to an extraordinary circumstance. Now, before people take this as a call for a rollback, I am not saying that it was a bad thing, only that it occurred under extraordinary circumstances when a vast swath of people could not provide for themselves. It was the expectation of government involvement that led to the expectation that the government could and would provide protection for people, that they would protect liberty and equality for all. The government was expected to be the protector of all, and in so doing, the expectation that individuals should provide some of their own protection faded.
This was when firearms, having lost their 'utility', started to acquire a more mythological aspect in American culture. In a culture where protection was now held largely in the hands of uniformed men (women were not yet common on police forces), and where television allowed the armed struggles in civil rights conflicts to show the power a few armed men had over masses of unarmed protesters, two divergent views appeared. One of these saw guns as a source of power that could be used to drive back "undesierables", the social forces of chaos and revolution. The other saw them as instruments of oppressive power, reinforcing older, obsolete cultural structures.
Out of both of these influences rose the notion that guns needed to be controlled somehow. The growing power of urban and suburban political districts allowed gun control laws to be passed at a statewide level, unfairly punishing those who still viewed guns as tools, akin to a group of suburbanites in a new development blocking farmers from using manure on their fields - an irrational, sudden change to something that had been done for decades, if not generations.
That this change occurred during the rise of feminism as a political force in the US is unfortunate, particularly given the use of "save the children" rhetoric that often accompanied calls for weapon bans. That the rise of feminism and the "castration" of power occurred at the same time is a result of similar social and historical developments, and have become linked in the minds of many, much as Mrs. Robinson draws the link between the rise of feminism and economic troubles above.
It seems inevitable, in this environment where a tool has become a symbol of power, that a reactionary, authoritarian culture has sprung up that literally idolizes that symbol. However, there is nothing inherent in firearms or even people who own firearms, that predisposes them in their entirety to become authoritarians or radical misogynists.
The vast majority of violent feelings against women is a mis-placed desire for revenge for circumcision.
Please. I am circumcized (like most Americans) and I harbor not a bit of resentment or anger over it. For hell's sake, I don't even remember it. Anyone who does was "done" at too old an age (and no, no one "remembers" their birth either).
Or was your statement a joke? Yeah, it must be a joke. My bad.
Dave and all: If you want to look at a REALLY NASTY kind of fascist revolution go to Sweden RIGHT NOW.
Is there an English-language version or a decent translation? Or how about a synopsis on the page?
>>Blithe comments from folks like BlackBloc ascribe the actions of these men to their anger at losing their power, but that assumes they had power in the first place. White males in the lower and lower-middle classes never had such power and never will.
The last post I made on that other comment thread might have been missed, but I've already responded to that misrepresentation of my views. I'm recopying it here:
*Déclassé* middle class white males. That qualifier is basically the crux of the issue.
You say 'lower middle-class'. But I consider that category to be mostly an invention, made up of *ex*-middle-class folks who have fallen to the lower class, and that their middle-class status is largely cultural and disconnected from their economic reality. This is the social category that is drawn to fascism, whether here or in the Mid East (they represent most of the recruits of radical Islamists, for instance) or anywhere else on this planet.
The rural poor you mention, for instance. It used to be that you could run a family farm, thus have a self-sustaining small business. Now due to many factors the agribusiness runs the whole industry, and these formerly self-employed people have been forced into either being employed by agribusiness, leaving for the city, or unemployment.
When you combine being raised in a middle-class culture, thus being given a sense of entitlement to middle-class levels of privilege, and the harsh reality of having fallen to the lower class, you get resentment and anger. It's easy to displace it towards the bouc émissaire du jour.
Further, the idea is that lower class males don't have power. The point is that, yes, they do have *some* amount of power over women, queers and ethnic and religious minorities. Men were (and often, in some communities, still are) the head of the household. That's power. And I would surmise that otherwise powerless people have even more of a stake in keeping what small amount of power they still have.
This is why I come here daily - for David and Mrs. Robinson's thoughtful, perceptive essays and the intelligence of the commenters.
Western-style misogyny probably has its roots in a Greek/Roman culture that gave women little power, political or otherwise, despite including women in its pantheon of gods.
Why lay the blame on the Helenes rather than the Hebrews who gave women ZERO power and utterly eradicated the Goddess from their religion?
I wouldn't try and argue that Helenic/Helenistic culture wasn't mysogynist, but it was not the virulant and reactionary mysogyny of the Hebrews. After all, Cleopatra ruled the empire of Ptolomey, Sappho was considered among the greatest of poets, Hypatia was the leading philosopher of her day and both Livia Drusillia and Julia Domna acted as regents for the whole of the Roman Empire. While in semitic culture you had... um... Ruth.
The Helenes sublimated the neolithic Great Goddess culture they displaced (see The Rapes of Zeus). The Hebrews, eventually, attempted to eradicate the Goddess entirely because they could never displace the Phonecians or their Goddesses (much less the Babylonians and such). While Zeus ruled over the goddesses (and gods) Yahweh was in constant competition with Tyrian Astarte and Babylonian Ishtar (not to mention Moloch and Ba'al, etc.).
Thus Hellenic religion could, at least, recognize female power because they could syncretize it. The Hebrews had to deny any such since their religion was utterly exclusionary. And their respective cultures followed suit.
And we, as inheritors of both cultures, got a double dose. But the rights women have gained in our Enlightenment culture are derived for the greater part from our Greco-Roman heritage not our Semitic heritage.
how long will (what passes for) the Left remain silent?
As Kristjan Wager pointed out, this is a nonsensical, or extremely ignorant, claim. Leftists, and especially explicitly feminist people, have been far from silent about these abuses for decades. It is, however, a popular nonsense rightwing talking point that this fact is untrue. In fact even for the factually challenged it may be simple ignorance, as the rightwing has shut its eyes and ears to these problems for years, and have also shut their eyes and ears to the left/feminist protests re these problems.
The rightwing, OTOH, only occasionally claims to be concerned about these problems, usually at convenient times like when they need yet another excuse for a war. Before, during, and after they never show any real concern, but they make the claim and talk the talk. They're all talk, these folks, while the left/feminist movements have been helping out and pointing out these things for decades.
and to think that we used to be modern.
Chivalry won't fix everything, it will just ensure that same-race, same-class women are treated better while other-race, other-class women are treated worse. Chivalry, in the old-fashioned Southern-gentleman style, was a way of establishing and displaying class superiority of the men and the helplessness of "their" women who could not be expected to be strong enough to....do any of the things the women servants did on a daily basis. There was surprisingly little left of the Christian medieval chivalry in the South. And even that was overrated, and shown to be so (cf: Wife of Bath's tale, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales).
Chivalry might better be defined as exercise of the Great Command to love God, and love your neighbor as yourself (Christian version). It is available to both sexes, but perhaps more exercisable in physical form by large strong men. Do I hold the door for little old ladies and men with canes/walkers? Yes, despite the fact that I am a woman. If the little old man is reasonably spry and wants to hold the door, do I let him? Yes. Am I as feminist as they come? Yes. The "feminists don't allow men to open doors for them" is highly overstated - "don't expect me to put out sexually, just because you held the door for me" was usually the context - men who tried to use chivalry to indicate ownership/power over women. I want to re-envision chivalry as "random acts of kindness", caritas, as the bumperstickers put it.
Adult men are aware of the needs of others, and attempt to meet some of the needs. Same for adult women. There is plenty of quest material in learning to be aware of yourself and others. A service project can be a quest.
I'm wondering about you folks pointing out Muslim misogyny. Are you holding it up as an example for Christian misogynists to emulate?
I grew up in rural gun culture (as did Dave), and have long noted the difference in the attitudes and ethics. Khadjair gives the underlying demographic shifts underlying this split in attitude, drilling down a level deeper than I've gone with this same idea, and I greatly appreciate his insight.
I've noted here before that I went to a high school where kids actually brought guns to school, in goodly numbers and on a regular basis. We had a rod and gun club; there was a target shooting team; and a lot of the boys belonged to Scouts, which sometimes included hunting and shooting activities. The guys would work on their guns in wood shop, carving new stocks and barrels; or work on the barrels and finishes in metal shop. It was a pickup kind of cowtown, so the senior parking lot was full of trucks with gunracks in the back window.
It was the kind of place that saw guns as tools. We were all raised to respect firearms and handle them properly (I went out shooting with Dad and his buddies the first time when I was five). I don't think opening fire at school would have ever occurred to anybody, any more than opening fire at home would have. Murders were rare -- once a decade or so. Accidents happened, of course: I remember the derision that rippled through the neighborhood when my younger brother put a .22 bullet through his foot when he was about 14. Nobody thought to worry about this, or take his guns away. It was just a life lesson about where to keep your trigger finger while you're pointing at the ground. Kinda funny. The foot healed. No big deal.
Yes, these people were deeply offended when state-level gun laws were passed, mostly on the fears of city folk. They were being told that they couldn't be trusted; that owning guns made them dangerous. For God-fearing, church-going people who were deeply invested in their communities, this was profoundly insulting. They saw it as meddling by city folk trying to impose their "protection" on people who were doing just fine without it. It was one of the main things that pulled rural Americans away from the deep Democratic roots they'd sunk since the days of FDR, and left them wide open to right-wing manipulation. In hindsight, it may have been one of the key liberal blunders of the past century. And it happened because they ignored their own commitment to understand and respect other cultures.
I'm also glad khadjair agrees with me that there is indeed "transitional turmoil" going on as a result of the feminist movement. I've heard a lot of denial that any such turmoil exists in recent days -- as though you could give half the population its biggest status shift in many centuries, and there would be no adjustment required on the part of anyone else whatsoever. This strikes me as totally disingenuous, if not a complete detachment from reality.
Others have agreed that, OK, maybe there are a few guys who are struggling with this -- but it's not OUR problem, and not our job to address it. They're big boys, and they need to get over it on their own. This understandable reluctance stems from the realization that women have been socialized to handle a lot of emotional baggage for men that they should be carrying on their own. I agree with this. But I think there comes a point where we have a human duty -- and an obligation to the larger health of society -- to recognize when people are seriously struggling, especially when they're struggling in ways that affect our larger interests as a society. At that point, we have an obligation to address those hurts.
In the meantime, some men are indeed working it out on their own -- with a little help from the Promise Keepers, the men's rights groups, or that great bunch of guys they met at the gun show. If that's what "leaving these guys to work it out on their own" is going to look like, it seems to me like we're going to end up with yet another cultural split where you've got two groups talking past each other, with nobody hearing what the other side is saying. We've already got a polarized right-left division that's well on its way to costing us the country. Adding a male-female axis to that polarization on top of it could cost us the entire civilization.
Nancy: We are of the same mind here. I think chivalry can be re-cast in ways that keep the caritas, without the dominator's baggage.
We women know that we're here to serve the culture. Most of us will raise kids and tend families at some point in our lives. We're raised to give, to make those contributions unstintingly (usually overly so). It's not even a question.
For men, how they will serve the larger culture IS a question. Young men have to be taught to value their connections to the common good, and behave in ways that serve and maintain it. They also need to see clearly how they'll be rewarded for doing that. I don't think we're doing a very good job these days of communicating any of that to men of any age.
And chivalry did do a pretty good job of communicating that, which is why it may be a useful place to start. I do agree it's not precisely where we want to end.
This was a fantastic read, thank you.
I'm interested in where, exactly, you're coming from with this bit: "Recognize, first, where it originates: In the twisted, sad view of humanity as innately evil and sick. In the strange mentality that perceives nature -- God's creation itself -- as sinful... These are all ideas we often associate now with our barbaric past, but the truth is that they live on in innumerable ways, especially embedded as they are in popular culture.".
What you think originally powered the memetic success of revulsion at the flesh? Do you take it as biological? Freudian? I don't think it makes sense to see it as a cultural impetus surviving only by constant repition; obviously constant repition plays a very big part in the current cultural dominance of the sublimated form of it you're awesome on the topic of. But where does it come from initially: why do I feel so keenly my own lack of "solitude, fasting and sexual abstinence" when my parents worked so wholeheartedly not to inculcate these values in me? Have you always held your belief in the essential goodness of humanity and if so how come? I'd love to know more of what you think about this, this piece was terrific.
Yes, these people were deeply offended when state-level gun laws were passed, mostly on the fears of city folk. They were being told that they couldn't be trusted; that owning guns made them dangerous. For God-fearing, church-going people who were deeply invested in their communities, this was profoundly insulting. They saw it as meddling by city folk trying to impose their "protection" on people who were doing just fine without it.
Mrs. Robinson, I think that this is truer than you realize. In the types of places where you and Dave grew up, as you say, guns were tools. Their use was well-regulated by the community, with community standards, and so words from above weren't needed.
But then you go into the cities. There aren't that many things for which guns are useful in a city; can anyone name anything that you could do with a gun in a city that wouldn't result in the shooter being dead or hauled into court? There aren't communities like there are in a small town -- maybe the people in your apartment building know your name, if you're in that kind of apartment, or maybe you're known on your block. But the sort of "everywhere you go, someone knows you and what you're doing" atmosphere that is in a small town is simply not possible or necessarily desirable in a city. The community policing of weaponry is simply not available to the same extent. So in cities (and, for the same reasons of lack of community, suburbs) the community control about weaponry is enforced by law, rather than community standards. And, for the most part, this makes people in densly populated areas happy, because, again, not much you can do with a gun in a city where the shooter doesn't wind up dead or in court.
The purpose of gun control in a densely populated area is to move the guns away so that no one gets hurt. The purpose of gun control in less populated areas is to make sure that the shooter isn't a damnfoolidjit (viz, Mrs. Robinson's brother) and ergo, no one gets hurt (in a permanent sort of way.) However, the law (required in those densely populated areas) doesn't and/or isn't able to make those differentiations, and you get people in less dense populations ticked off at those damnfoolidjits in cities that can't control their own people, and people in cities ticked off at the crazy yahoos who want to go out and kill things for no good reason. (That last sentence being pure stereotype.)
Anyway, my point in all of this is that there are some really good reasons (which I have admittedly not gone into here) for gun control in densely populated areas. However, with the law, everyone has to follow the same rules. And we get fiction where maybe there wouldn't be.
Technocracygirl, yes, absolutely. I've made this half of the argument as well. It's just a huge difference in cultural needs between city and country.
I went from that small town to college, where I spent four years wedged in between a barrio and a ghetto in South-Central LA. A very frightening place, then and now. I lived about 30 blocks from where Reginald Denny got it during the riots.
And, yeah, in that environment, guns are just plain stupid. Too many people, too many crazies, and nobody who actually knows what they're doing with the damn things. City people are not stupid for wanting to ban guns. After four years of living in blighted neighborhoods (two of them spent lugging a .38 Colt around in my purse everytime I left the house -- my dad insisted after the car broke down in Compton one night and I got mugged), the charms of gun control were not lost on me.
The failure was, as khadjair noted, that rather than deal with this city-by-city, the laws were passed at the state level. Which meant that people in the cities unthinkingly imposed their rules on people who didn't need or want them. (And, when challenged on this, their response was, "Well, we know what's best for you." The condescension just rankled.) It was a blatant act of cultural imperialism, the kind progressives are supposed to get all riled up about when it happens to Native Americans or Kalahari Bushmen or gay people.
Nobody got riled up, except the folks in the country. And since they don't matter anyway -- just a bunch of backward Mayberry bumpkins -- nobody felt obligated to listen.
let me see what is going on
U.S. Soldier Reported Missing in Baghdad
Interesting that an age in which there is certainly a great deal of learned misogyny, but no secular authority strong and organized enough to pursue a full-scale witch-hunt, gets called "Dark."
(Indeed, if there ever was a time when women exercised serious power, it was Europe before 1100 -- the era of great influential abbesses like Hildegard of Bingen, a leading intellectual of the twelfth century, or earlier, the abbess Hild who was one of the leaders at the Synod of Whitby in the 7th century. In an age of household government, queens and other women at royal and noble courts participated directly in political decision-making.)
Whereas the late 16th and early 17th centuries -- the height of the European Witch Craze -- doesn't get that derogatory adjective.
Modern professional medievalists no longer use the term "Dark Ages" for the period 500-1000.
(If there ever was a Dark era in the history of the West, it's the 20th century.)
Please update your terminology. And consider that sweeping statements as to what evils "Christianity" (as if that were something static, uncomplicated, and without countervailing notions of human freedom and equality) is to be blamed for are highly questionable, problematic things.
Hy, I'm a "24" fan and I haven't turned into some fascist warmonger and torture advocate. Some of us like to watch it just because it is a heart pounding thriller.
After Hitler's defeat, this pathology again slithered to the fringes. Mostly you could find complaints about "feminized" Christianity from folks like Identity pastor Pete Peters and Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler.
Au contraire - it was there in the pages of National Review and all the mainstream as well as the obscure conservative publications during the 1970s.
I remember well the frothing, overwrought, endless fulminations of the Buckley crew over the syllable "Ms." and how it signaled - along with the attempts to pass the ERA, the cultural decline epitomized by "inclusive language" liturgies, nuns refusing to wear veils, the wearing of trousers instead of skirts by girls, and the acceptance of divorced women and unwed mothers - that decline of Western Civilization that was going to leave us the victims of the Godless Commies/Secular Humanists/Muslim Hordes even then taking over Old Europe...
Don't confuse not having been paying attention for absence; just because you noticed something doesn't mean it wasn't there all along.
And chivalry was always a crock of lies. "Protection" was never anything more than it remains under the gentle hand of the mafia - ie, a racket.
Kristjan Wager, I am unconcerned whether you're impressed with me or not. What I am concerned with is fighting Fascism and misogyny in all forms. As for (what passes in America for) "The Left", they seem to suffer the occassional bout of amnesia or become busy with other things, while "The Right" lives in total ignorance and really doesn't care because, after all, women in Islamic nations are "The Other". I hope you share my concern and I'll try not to criticize your friends with too much severity.
Is Haloscan Broken???
Concerning the apparent "lack of purpose" of some men today:
Men ought to have a ready-made larger purpose in raising their children, but the structure of modern society has led to uninvolved fathers - and this happened in the pre-feminist 19th century as part of the Industrial Revolution. In pre-industrial societies, men needed to train their sons in the family business, if any, or at least show them enough farming or animal-care technique to make them employable as farmhands if there was no family land available. The commonest worksite was the home and nearby land, and children were turned into little laborers as soon as practicable. The very well off educated their sons to be able to keep books or pursue law cases related to the family business, but it was strictly on the job training for the great majority of children. Daughters, of course, were apprentices of their mothers.
The onset of the industrial revolution placed the male worker away from his family for 60 or more hours a week, the male bureaucrat away from his family, the male shopowner increasingly away from his family since the shopowner often stopped living above the shop. The sign of gentility was to have a non-working wife who increasingly depended on outside purveyors of things and food formerly produced at home. Demands for formal education exceeded the former mere letters and arithmetic for most middle class children vs. university for the future priests. Schooling was placed outside the home. Apprenticeship was placed outside the home. Work was placed outside the home. Men had increasingly little contact with their children, and began to regard their raising as women's business not just in the pre-productive infant-toddler stage, but in the school and apprentice ages.
Feminism had nothing to do with the rise of uninvolved dads. This is a function of the Industrial Age.
(to next post)
(remainder of 10/25/06, 3:14 post)
Now, we have additional competitors for men's attention in the overheated consumer goods market aimed at them. Yes, luxury transportation has been around for more than two centuries (middleclass college students buying horses they couldn't afford, in Austen's Northanger Abbey, is a good fictional example of consumerism in 1800). Young men now also have electronic gear, the latest iPods, flat screen TVs, etc to divert budgets away from saving for a potential family, and have more various entertainments available (men always had prostitutes, and the rate of prostitutes to total number women has dropped dramatically in the last century in the industrialized world). Early commitment to family and childraising is neither expected socially nor considered "cool" for men. "Cool" for men is having all the latest consumer goods in our culture.
Again, feminism is not the cause of the anomie, consumerism is the cause. Men don't have the cultural dictate to Be Useful or Be a Father. Sex is now available from non-prostitutes, but face it, even if every unmarried middle class young woman swore to stop putting out without The Ring in hand, there would be enough prostitutes out there to keep the young consumer men in sex - there are always poor women who need money.
We have a pop culture which says that volunteerism is for chumps too dumb to get to Wall Street. Privatisation is the answer to everything. The poor deserve their lot. The rich are inherently more virtuous. Any wonder the young men drift away from possible useful, community oriented activity to consumerism? And to be realistic, a lot of the young men can't even afford the consumerism in even modest doses.
All good and true, Nancy. And a tale well told.
Feminism, in its early days, promised to address a lot of this post-industrial erosion of the family base. We were going to bring men back home, and get them re-invested in their kids. (Which, to a pretty good degree, we did. Dave, in fact, may be Exhibit A.) Part of that vision was that they were also going to share more of the housework, too, so we'd be freed up to go have lives of our own. That part is still not going anywhere as near as well as we'd hoped.
Which comes back around to my original argument. Women started this shift, in no small part as an effort to reclaim our pre-industrial place beside the men, both in the workplace and at home. And, for the most part, we're working through our part of the change -- but men's piece of it seems tobe taking a whole lot longer than I think any of us expected it to.
This isn't blaming feminism or women or even men. It's just saying that change of this magntitude takes more time than we think it will, and always generates unintended consequences. And now we've got the consequences you describe so well: guys who see culture as stuff, rather than relationships and creative endeavors; and who are still resistant in too many cases to sharing either homespace or workspace with us. None of us wanted or expected this. But it's here. It happened. And, from what I'm hearing from the men, a lot of them are really angry and frustrated by it, and are beyond ready to put their social roles onto a new footing.
Interestingly, the footing some of them seem to be asking for is the one we first offered back in those early days -- a definition of manhood that includes something other than their economic value, and opportunities for cultural engagement that reward them with approval rather than frustrate or stymie them into unwinnable games. Which suggests to me that some rapprochement can occur -- if we can find some common language for discussing what they do need, in ways that don't build boxes around people's thinking.
Absent some serious economic and class-based analysis, I don't think the majority of men will progress beyond the handily offered "men should run everything and women should be the handmaidens" answer provided by conservative versions of religions and by pundits glorifying the Way Things (N)ever Were. It surely is no coincidence that the Country Club Republicans have encouraged and funded the rise of the Political Pastors, often despite a lack of real personal interest in religion.
This is a really excellent discussion. Thank you to Dave, Mrs. Robinson, and everyone else.
--(the other) Dave
Well, it just makes sense, right? For men freaked out by the "other," women are the original "not-me," and are, therefore, to be hated, controlled, and "defended" against.
Oh crap. I just read what I wrote and realized that I really did spend too much time in graduate school in the late 80s and early 90s.
One of the most illuminating things anybody's said to me in this long conversation so far came from an offline exchange with a sometime commenter here, who said:
The favoured way to represent a man as a failure is to represent him as someone not worthy of the system, i.e. as a woman. Never mind that the qualities of a "failed" man have nothing to do with women- women are not cowardly, not morally weak, not excessively emotional, etc., yet these are the qualities identified within the patriarchal code as "effeminate".
I'm offering this as a sort of follow-on to Nancy's "duh" moment above. (It's OK, NP. I keep falling into these myself.) The above idea -- which may have come to my correspondent via Barbara Eherenreich -- struck me as a critical insight. Women are strong as hell. Most men know (and are possibly quite frightened by) that. One thing we can all be doing, at the very least, is calling guys on this tendency to call weak men "women," thus fobbing off their own failures onto the girls.
No. They are are not "wussies" or "pussies" or "girls." They are weak men. And that, as an insult, is far more devastating.
Sara,
Your friend is correct as far as men from the lower middle class and below (i.e., blue collar through working poor) are concerned, but "failure" is judged quite differently above those classes.
The ideal working class male traits-- being a straight-shooter, not shying away from anger or violence-- are serious impediments to advancement in the white collar, upper middle class male world. There, being too "masculine" or "macho" makes you a weak man and unworthy of advancement.
Ironic, huh?
I speak from experience and observation. I owe my current level of success to hard lessons learned about power politics in the workplace about six years ago, something that I was COMPLETELY blind to because of my upbringing. If I had not learned how to be more "diplomatic" (as opposed to a straight-shooter) and hold my temper better, I would not be where I am today.
On the other hand, many working class people might view me as a weak man for not standing up more for the courage of my convictions. I might be called (unfairly, I believe), a brown-noser or kiss-ass because I have suppressed my instincts for conflict. This is the same dynamic that causes working class blacks to accuse middle class blacks of "trying to be white."
Again, I submit that social class influences perceptions as much, if not more, than gender.
Griff, I've noticed this, too, as I moved from the lower middle class into the professional classes. I know about that blindness, because I spent a couple decades unlearning it, too.
The part of me that's never left the trailer park still has a quiet contempt for men who equivocate, who will recite the party line rather than say what they fucking mean, already. I can't imagine ever having a relationship with one.
I think that's another reason I like geeks. It's the one place in the professional classes where that communication style is still valued. Scientists and engineers rely on their intimate relationship with empirical truth, and their ability to state it clearly. Furthermore, they have the same palpable unease with people who will fudge the truth -- nothing brings greater contempt in the sci/tech world that someone who can't be trusted to tell the truth about their data. It's where I found the smart straight shooters, the ones I could bring home to Dad and my brothers and know they'd be OK with.
My husband had to work hard to unlearn those direct habits when he moved from programming into management. And you may be right about the gender thing -- if there's one thing upper-class men dislike more than working-class directness in men, it's finding that same trait in women. My mouth has gotten me in no end of trouble over the years.
I'm not sure "macho" per se makes you unworthy of advancement to the top ranks, though. There's something else at work that qualifies this -- not sure what. Most of the tech execs I've known were very macho -- many of them high-SDO creeps who were all about power and dominance and proving whose was bigger.
Wow. Just Wow.
This is one of the best posts and best threads of comments I've ever seen anywhere.
Re: wapsie, Dark Ages
In scientific terms the word dark does not refer to morally depraved or things like that but to the lack of reliable sources from the era. There is also a dark age in ancient Greek history when the art of writing was lost again for several generations and there is not that much archeological material available.
The early to medium Middle Ages produced a lot of paper (more precise: parchment) but the contents are usually so unreliable due to conmtemporary and later forgery that the historic value is severely limited.
For a historian an age is dark, if he can't find out much about it, not that it was an age of cruelty.
Our current times could be the dark ages of the future because we store most of our information on carriers with limited halflife while older cultures used materials that last (clay tablets, parchment etc.)
>>My husband had to work hard to unlearn those direct habits when he moved from programming into management.
As a far leftist and a techie, I offer my condolences. 
Look, we need to have those "duh" moments as alluded to above - because if we don't, attention shifts to the Scapegoat of the Day being sold by the culture and the mass media. What seems like elementary history to geeks is forgotten by a large percentage of the public.
BTW, thanks for the praise for geeks. That's why I entered the field I am in - a lack of tactical manipulative thinking can be an obstacle in some workplaces. It's much nicer to work with folks who Just Want To Get The Job Done, Already.
I have thought about this a lot lately and recommend Arthur Silber's series on Alice Miller's theories, which go into the psychological depth of fascism and explore its relationship to child abuse.
in that context it only seems natural that misogyny and fascism would be connected. In Alice miller's theory as I understand it and this is going to be an extremely gross oversimplification the fascist is denying the fact that some authority figure hurt him when young. He follows authority figures because the only other option is to confront whats' wrong with some authority in his past. In patriarchal societies authority is pretty much equated with maleness.
To the person who is raising Islamic issues I don't understand what you think should be done about them. Societies have to progress on their own. There are progressives in Islamic societies just like there are here. Help or get out of the way. Don't try to save them though or try to show them your model as their only option. They don't appreciate it, any more than you would have appreciated it 500 years ago when you were living in some cave in France if a civilized and enlightened Arab from Baghdad had tried to make you see the error in your ways.
I tend to agree with Griff's analysis. I have taken the time to view the question of authoritarian behavior in terms of evolutionary biology and some proven ideas in brain neurobiology. (see Linking Behavior with Policy ) Its a slightly different perspective and it is highly speculative, but I think it calls us to view the world in a way different from how we now do, and more like the view I find here. I trust it complements what you are saying here.
Anna in Portland/Cairo--
Pay no attention to Saverino and the whole question of what the Left is doing for women in Muslim countries. It's a smokescreen; the general term is "concern trolling".
Of course leftist groups have actually worked toward sexual equality in the Islamic world and offered support and solidarity to those feminists within that community; it would be very hard to name a group from the right that has done anything constructive with respect to sex and gender equality in any country. (The exception, oddly, might be oil companies.)
I think that blaming men's extended adolescence on consumerism is confusing cause with effect: men play with toys because they need something to do while waiting out their extended adolescence.
Feminism has made women valued for their economic contributions to the home, but this has not made men less valued for their economic contribution.
And, in an environment where, presupposing that he is a plausible relationship partner, a significant fraction of a man's value in the relationship market is his income, then it does not make sense for a man to enter the long-term relationship market while his future income is subject to more-than-usual uncertainty. And so, he waits until after he has gotten education, some kind of career started, until he turns marriage-minded.
I'm not entirely sure that there is anything wrong with a man's extended adolescence, nor (being male) am I really qualified to comment on whether women collectively have a problem with it. But if they do, women need to communicate to men the significance of their non-economic value: a man needs to understand (if it is true, that is) that a woman who has less use for his paycheck does not necessarily have less use for him.
Funny: Sara and Griff are pretty much describing my own adventures in corporate management.
I think the people who worked for me will tell you I was a good manager, mebbe an excellent one. The teams I oversaw were all highly motivated and very skilled. Many of them are still my friends today.
The key to managing them well, however, was being straight with them. I tried to make sure that things were as transparent as possible, because I wanted to kill off the usual office politics as much as possible. Mostly it worked.
I soon found, however, that being a straight shooter was not valued by upper management types -- which at first astonished me, since if I were in their shoes I'd feel like I was flying blind without people who gave me the straight poop. But no; egos and phony status markers rule the world of upper management. Rather than being rewarded for being a straight shooter, I found I was being punished for it.
At which point I pretty much opted out. It's not that I think people who succeed at it are necessarily ethics-challenged shills, though many in fact are. It just came down to what I saw myself doing 10 years down the road along that path, and it wasn't what I wanted to be doing.
i hear that, david.
as far as the discussion, i grew up in a "traditional" sex-segregated, right-wing, gun-obsessed community. this article describes exactly the the character of the men who lived there, but i was never really able to get a clear picture of how women were able to cope: how they could live, apparently happily, under the pall of suh fear and hatred.
why do these discussions always seem to neglect the female perspective?
to refine my last point above: not that female voices aren't being heard here, but i'd like to know more about the victims themselves. do they see themselves as victims? do they buy into this stuff? shall we christen a syndrome in honour of eva braun, or stick with stockholm?
"I soon found, however, that being a straight shooter was not valued by upper management types -- which at first astonished me, since if I were in their shoes I'd feel like I was flying blind without people who gave me the straight poop. But no; egos and phony status markers rule the world of upper management. Rather than being rewarded for being a straight shooter, I found I was being punished for it."
Faced with the same behavior from upper management (which I guess is where I've since wound up), I learned to shoot straight differently depending on which direction I'm shooting, up or down. When communicating down the chain of command, my focus is on providing AS MUCH information as necessary to secure/reinforce their trust and respect in me as their manager (even when the talk is tough about performance etc., I want my reports to know that I am fair and they will be given a real chance to succeed). When communicating up the chain of command, my focus is on providing AS LITTLE information as necessary to allow them to make decisions they actually need to make while allowing them to demonstrate to me that they are worthy of my trust and respect. (My mantra is that, in an ideal world, you want to both trust and respect your manager. If you trust your manager, it's okay if you don't respect him/her. But if you don't trust your manager, you need to change jobs.)
What I find interesting is what I call the "employee mentality," which I think, in part, results in authoritarian followers. I've found that many people, regardless of class or education, have a deep distrust of their employers that puts them at odds with their employers from day one. This ultimately prevents advancement beyond a certain point, at which time they get a new job and start the cycle over again. This basic distrust NEVER goes away, but the belief that they can ever beat "the Man" ultimately gets beaten out of them, and they learn to accept the situation as a type of "natural order" (as described by Russell Kirk in the Conservative Mind).
The belief in a "natural order" (e.g., the divine right of kings) can lead to blind, unquestioning obdience to those in power. This refusal to exercise power "upwards" (e.g., to test whether your manager is worthy of your loyalty), when coupled with a belief in a "natural order" invariably leads to exercising power "downwards" to establish dominance.
With the disillusionment caused by the unions in this country (my grandparents started unions in CT to make conditions better for workers; my father, still a blue collar worker, believes that unions were good once but are now corrupt), many working class people have all but abandoned the liberal ideals they once championed and which led to the New Deal. "Same Shit, Different Day" is the only deal they know now, and many of them (i.e., and I hate to say this, mostly those of European descent) find the power that authoritarianism offers to be quite enticing. Everybody wants to feel empowered. Sadly, authoritarianism offers power solely through the denigration of those "below" you. If we can find a way to convince working class people that they can empower themselves by lifting themselves up instead of denigrating others, we might be able to duplicate FDR's success.
"to refine my last point above: not that female voices aren't being heard here, but i'd like to know more about the victims themselves. do they see themselves as victims? do they buy into this stuff? shall we christen a syndrome in honour of eva braun, or stick with stockholm?"
The "victims" probably do not view themselves as such. According to Russell Kirk, conservatives believe that there is a natural order of things. If everything looks the same as it ever was, then that's just the way it is.
Personally, I would counsel against using the term "victim" with these women until AFTER they have come to that conclusion themselves. Until then, you need to convince them that there is a better, more fulfilling life than what they know. Otherwise, you may find that they may object to being called a victim: it worked for their mom, so how dare you attack their way of life. I think the "culture war" we're involved in right now is all about the fact that people who like their way of life were called victims or stupid because of it.
Rob, "offering the female perspective" is a fraught enterprise, as just about any female blogger can attest. If the patriarchal men don't freak out, the fundie feminists will. My observation is that:
a) it takes considerable intestinal fortitude for a woman to say her piece anyway; and
b) a lot of sensible women (evidently, a pool that does not include yours truly) take one look at the shitpile they'll have to deal with, weight it against the slim progress they're likely to make, and think better of saying a single word.
However, if you want perspective from a woman who's been there on how we deal(t), here's the clue: we become manipulative as hell. Lots of games get played -- with sex, with money, with cooperation and attention and whatever else we might have that constitutes leverage. Same with any oppressed class: the oppressor makes rules; the oppressed works overtime to find ways to game them.
Here's a separate but (hopefully) related point.
When I was younger, I naively applied my belief in the liberal ideal of equality so as to expect that everybody was capable of being as smart as I am, if only they applied themselves. Clearly, I was wrong. (I know this sounds arrogant today as phrased, but I was valedictorian of my high school and graduated from MIT with a degree in electrical engineering and later from a top 20 law school, so my heart was in the right place at the time.) In hindsight, it simply was wrong to judge everybody else by the level of success I was able to achieve, even if my conclusion was simply that they could do better (instead of concluding that I was simply better than they were).
I've since adjusted my interpertation of "equality" as the desire, not expectation, to empower everybody to reach his/her full, inate potential, whatever that may be.
While I now accept that everybody may have unequal levels of talent, intelligence and/or skill, I still reject the notion of a natural order, which I view as call to simply give up and accept your fate. I call BS on that idea, which is at the heart of authoritarianism. If we can convince the authoritarian follower that self-improvement, and not the denigration of others, is the true path to self-fulfillment, we'll slay this beast.
griff: "Personally, I would counsel against using the term "victim" with these women until AFTER they have come to that conclusion themselves. Until then, you need to convince them that there is a better, more fulfilling life than what they know."
well, i won't presume to try to convince anyone of anything, leastways because i am not a woman and, at least in comparison to 99.999% of the world's population, not opressed. but you've taken my point. is victim the right word?
mrs. robinson: "we become manipulative as hell. Lots of games get played -- with sex, with money, with cooperation and attention and whatever else we might have that constitutes leverage"
now that you mention it, DUH. of course i've seen that. but perchance the ruse is discovered. does it bury you in a deeper pile? also, is the coping mechanism that women in a fascistic misogynistic environment use similar to the one a woman in a vaguely sexist, somewhat-egalitarian, but still male-dominated culture would use? does my own educated, liberated better half use the same coping strategy with me that she'd use on a physically abusive ogre and simply adjust by degree? do all male-female relationships express this tendency?
interestingly, it has not been my experience that male academics are any cleverer or less obtuse about their misogyny than the basest redneck.
A magnificent post, as usual, from Dave. i do, however, have to agree with one of the earlier commenters that Dave's not mentioning the brutal and barbaric treatment of women by many Muslims, as dictated in the Quran (though to what degree is open to interpretation), constitutes a glaring omission. Christianity has contributed mightily, but so has Islam.
Sara Robinson asked, in the very first comment:
Are these guys, on some level, moving onto a war footing? And if so, why, and for what, and against whom?
A large part of it is probably anger displacement, fed and watered by people like Limbaugh and Savage and O'Reilly.
If you look at real wages, they peaked sometime around 1970 and for various reasons (mostly the murder of organized labor) have been dropping ever since. Used to be that a steelworker could send his kids to college while his wife stayed at home; now his sons and their wives both have to work outside the home just to keep up on the mortgage and credit card payments that let them pretend that they shared the same standard of living as their debt-free parents.
But the men are unable or unwilling to recognize this, and feel powerless to do anything to fix this -- so instead of fighting the real enemy, they seek out targets who they believe they can reach with minimal effort: Women, gays, blacks, "liberals", etc.
Modern professional medievalists no longer use the term "Dark Ages" for the period 500-1000.
I just watched, on TLC I think it was, last evening a show, Secrets of the Dead. It was a study into one of the "causes of the Dark Ages". They used that term. I have always used that term and simply understood it to mean, in the West, the abject poverty and loss of knowledge and learning, that went along with the collapse of the Roman Empire. Now then, this particular show did throw in a somewhat new take on the "Dark" part of the Dark Ages, in that they went into the literal Dark part. Dark as in lack of light (photons).
This is an aside, by the way. Apparently, worldwide in the tree ring data, the period from 536 to 540 is marked (again, worldwide, EVERYWHERE) by narrow tree bands. The narrowness is significant, signifying significant cooling. Contemporary documents from around the world also describe the dimming of the sun and fear that the sun would never return to its former brightness and warmth.
Turns out that there is good evidence that the repeat catastrophic volcano at Krakatoa blew itself to hell around 536. The explosion was even heard and documented in China. It sits so close to the equator that the ash dumped into the atmosphere would spread and involve the entire globe in dimming effects from high altitude ash. Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica indicate a spike in sulfuric acid levels at that same time - sulfuric acid spikes are the signature of volcanic eruptions vs meteor strikes or comet strikes. Thus, the Dark Ages may have been helped along into the general misery of people all over the world (worldwide crop failures and starvation), quite literally, by a darkening of the sun. The Dark Ages: dark due to loss of all the learning and technology that Rome provided (leaving aside the cruelty) AND dark due to, well, darkness.
I think that one should be very careful about the idea that christianity hates the body and sex. That is simply not true. That creation is evil is a heretical idea that has been dealt with many, many times throughout the history of christianity. It is not christian and simply cannot be defended as christian. Gnostic yes. Christian no. One of the problems that there are many heresies like this which were rejected.
What does happen is that people feel they are 'familiar' with christianity because it is all around them and therefore know what it is. They are often not. They create a straw-man
There are a lot of websites that do apologetics out there. Why not send this article out to a number of them to get responses.
It would be a very interesting followup article and would basically write itself.
yes well american society has, since the 60s, a period that scared the elites badly because people who got Jesus' true message advocated living as he had advocated, among other things...and of course peace and love threatens the economic well being of the warmongers.
Hence, a counter-image of the sensitised male; a cartoonish square-jawed immortal heroic type has been foisted upon us. TV violence is extreme and always presented as righteous, except of course, when done by the "bad guys". Adherence to adolescent fantasies of world domination, fueld in part by equally adolescent responses to being rejected, bullied or the like, has caused people in charge of our world to confused violent Hollywood fantasies about superheros and infallible mission impossible teams, with reality. Hence, Iraq. Hence the childish and uniquely male perception that rule through force and violence can ever succeed.
The constant snarking at any feminine trait or contribution, coupled with the contining efforts legislatively and otherwise to control women's sexuality, plus massive and voluminous reliance by millions of twisted American (and other) men on Viagra belie any claim that mysogyny isn't alive and well here. Hatred and fear of women DRIVES American culture. I haven't lived in other places long enough to comment about them so please don't misunderstand my comment as relating exclusively to American men. It is patently obvious in America that millions of American men and unfortunately, those in power, loathe and fear women to the point of irrationality. Their murderous and dictatorial policies demonstrate their contempt each day.
They worship death. Death and money. These are profoundly unfeminine and un Christian ideologies.
This is such a terribly complex subject and I think you have done an outstanding job of tying very long and difficult strings together.
The public hatred of women is seen in the extreme reactions to Hilary, Jennifer Granholm, Pelosi, and even The Dixie Chicks. These damned uppity women displacing low and high status men.
The mouth frothing dislike you see spewed at these women for having the audacity to be good at their jobs, and stand up for themselves, and to laugh in the face of the men that assault them is too much to bear.
Way more than any male, with the possible exception of Michael Moore, they are dispised and reviled. Jane Fonda played this role in the VietNam war, Tokyo Rose in WWII. When men are engaged in the most macho of pursuits-WAR-there is nothing like having a women to hate.
I am deeply grateful for this discussion, and for having been included in it. Dave is to be commended. When I wrote the Truthdig piece, gender was the centerpiece of the anlaysis, a fact that was studiously ignored by many allies and studiously dimissed by opponents. Bit too close to the bone, it seems. That the subject is being taken up in so many dimensions here and with this unusual clarity by more males is very encouraging. Men taking responsiblity for fighting patriarchy, instead of consigning it to the intellectual-activist ghetto of "women's issues", is imho critical to the refoundation of the left as a credible political force; and failure to do so will continue to leave us -- deservedly -- on the margins.
On the last comment I am reading, about attacks on Hillary Clinton, Jennifer Granholm, Nancy Pelosi, and The Dixie Chicks, I hasten to point out that the left is just as guilty of this kind of miosgyny as the right at times. Patriarchy still crosses these frontiers too readily. Case in point are sexual suggestions about Condoleeza Rice, Ann Coulter, et al.
These attacks are excused because of the execrable nature of these particular women's politics, but the sexualization of those attacks articulate with the proprietary trope of attacking "the enemy's women," and not attacking them on the basis of their politics, but of their sex. The same critique applies to jokes about prison rape (humiliation by feminization, male-top aggressor, sex as discipline/punishment), which are always, it seems, allowable against one's political enemies, left or right.
>> Griff: I've found that many people, regardless of class or education, have a deep distrust of their employers that puts them at odds with their employers from day one.
You're confusing cause and effect here. People have a deep distrust of their employers BECAUSE they are at odds from day one. It's called "class war". The interests of the employing class and those of the employed are irreconciliable, because the employer is a parasite upon the worker.
And yes, it's true: I like women. Always have. Always will. Something wrong with that?
Terribly.
What an odd question!
As I read this post and pondered how we are always in perpetual war somewhere in the world, it made me think about an article called Idea of Capitalism Versus Communism is a Lie. As I think about the implications of what the article describes, and how our world will look in the very near future, it seems to me that the women we love will need even more protection if military rule really does hit our streets.
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