Gender Focus Reads: Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power

menspeakout

by Jarrah Hodge

Every once in a while I’m asked to recommend books or other resources for men who are new to feminism and want to learn more. I usually start with bell hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody and follow up with Michael Kaufman and Michael Kimmel’s more recent and more specific book, The Guy’s Guide to Feminism. Now I have a new one to add to the list – one that really explores the diversity of issues and identities of male feminists and pro-feminists: Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power.

The 2nd edition of Shira Tarrant’s edited anthology contains 41 essays (11 new since the first edition) around six themes: Masculinity and Identity, The Politics of Sex and Love, Dealing with Violence and Abuse, Masculinity at Work and Home, Men and Feminism, and Taking Action, Making Change. The insightful, personal pieces cover a range of topics within these themes, including masculinity in hip hop culture, teaching men about violence against women, sexual harassment in the U.S. Military, the problems with the “fathers’ rights” movement, and explorations of sexuality and gender identity.

It’s hard to narrow it down, but if I had to pick my top three highlights of the book, they would be Amit Taneja’s “From Oppressor to Activist: Reflections of a Feminist Journey”, which uses a series of narrative “snapshots” to explore the author’s path to becoming a feminist as a gay, immigrant, person of colour; Jacob Anderson-Minshall on grappling with newfound privilege after transitioning from lesbian to straight white man; and C. Winter Han on fighting racism in the queer community and homophobia in anti-racist groups.

The only quibble I had with the book was Michael S. Kimmel’s intro to his essay, “Abandoning the Barricades: or How I Became a Feminist”. Overall I’m a big fan of Kimmel’s work. I already mentioned The Guy’s Guide to Feminism and Manhood in America is another must-read for anyone interested in the how our current gender roles in the West have been built through pop culture and politics. But I was a tiny bit disappointed reading his contribution to this book because he prefaces it by saying there are things in this older essay that he no longer agrees with, but doesn’t identify specifically what those are other than saying he now identifies as “pro-feminist” rather than “feminist”:

“I’ve left the text as I wrote it in 1975…I do so not because I stand behind every word I wrote more than thirty-five years ago; indeed, I would take a few things back, mute or sharpen various points, or change the language. No, I leave it the way I wrote it not because I stand behind every single word, but because I still stand with the young man who first wrote them.”

I felt like that was kind of a cop-out because it forced me as someone who has a lot of respect for Kimmel to give him the benefit of the doubt on things I disagreed with (it was mostly the overall slightly self-righteous and condescending tone I objected to, such as when he talks about feeling “angry at the men and protective toward the women” watching harassment in his college dorm). I would’ve appreciated more clarity on what he would and wouldn’t stand by so I didn’t just have to assume. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s a minor point.

Back to the big picture: there are big questions about the appropriate roles for men in feminism and Tarrant identifies some of these in her intros to the various sections. For example, in the intro to the part on Men and Feminism, Tarrant writes:

“The puzzle is this: How can we (a) make room in feminism to account for men as “our comrades in struggle,” while (b) retaining a central focus on women, yet (c) avoid reinscribing the gender binaries that feminism-as-female invokes?” Read more

Posted on April 1, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism 1 Comment

Review: All Men Are Jerks *Until Proven Otherwise by Daylle Deanna Schwartz

by Roxanna Bennett

All Men are Jerks *Until Proven Otherwise, a self-help dating book by Daylle Deanna Schwartz, sinks victim-blaming to new depths. From the back cover where the author states: “Men really can be jerks* but only if you let them” to this choice quote: “Look at all the abused women who stay! They say it’s okay to abuse them by not leaving”, Schwartz repeatedly attempts to hammer home the idea that women are weak, needy, dependent, and frankly, stupid, while men are manipulative douche-bags…but only because women let them be.

Schwartz’s intention was to create an empowering book for women wanting to take control of their lives. Instead she has shifted the blame from the poor behaviour of others back onto the person who is treated badly. In this case, women. All women, everywhere. In a cultural landscape where women fight desperately for pay equity, respect, bodily autonomy and authority, Schwartz strips away the social constructs that make this fight a necessity and shoves fault back down the throats of women.

Schwartz positions herself as a woman scorned by the father of all douchebags but blames herself for letting Him (her capitalization throughout the book) treat her badly. This is the foundation of her philosophy. Men take advantage of women because women let them. Women need to stop letting men manipulate them by buying them flowers, talking them into having sex without condoms, standing them up on dates, and outright abusing them. Women are needy. We apparently fall to pieces over a few daisies and have no trouble putting out without condoms because we’re so horny we think with our vaginas instead of our brains. Brains, it seems to Schwartz, are lacking in women.

Her suggestions for self-empowerment are pretty standard. Love yourself. This includes a shockingly almost progressive chapter on masturbation – almost progressive because while Schwartz says there’s nothing wrong with promiscuity, you need to wait and let a man earn your trust before you put out for him (a little sprinkling of slut-shaming to go with her victim-blaming). Build your self-esteem through affirmations. Tap into your spirituality. Accept yourself. Then learn to say no to jerks, you hussy.

This ridiculously simplistic idea is insulting to anyone who has ever navigated the complexity of a romantic relationship. The heteronormative stereotype of men and women dating make this book read like a long Cosmpolitan or Men’s Health magazine article. Hello! Schwartz has been quoted in both magazines, and has appeared on both Oprah and the Howard Stern show, peddling her brand of blame shifting disguised as self-empowerment.

Books like this one contribute to a culture that allows shame to fester, releases true abusers from the consequences of their actions by telling women, not only should you have known better, but it’s your fault he treated you badly. Reading this book help a few readers examine their own patterns of behaviour for improvement but it has the very real potential for causing more damage than good by reinforcing what the world already tells us: men are jerks because women want them to be.

Posted on March 18, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism Leave a comment

Revisiting The Feminine Mystique

by Chanel Dubofsky

My copy of The Feminine Mystique has a smell that I associate with trashy romance novels. I haven’t opened it in years, probably since I read it for a giant paper I wrote in college, about Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, confessional poetry and the domestic trap of the 1960’s. If you haven’t read it, here’s the deal (but you should read it): Friedan interrogates “the problem that has no name”, which is the misery of women living in material comfort who have husbands and children.

In short, women are told their entire lives that they will and must find fulfillment exclusively in their roles as a homemaker, wife, and mother. At the end of the book, Friedan discusses the importance of shifting our thinking around femininity, fulfillment, education and activism.

The book scared the hell out of me. I read it in my dorm lounge, and at the risk of being dramatic, my reaction was probably proportional to that of people when they saw “The Exorcist” during its original run in theatres. Whatever hallmates happened to be around were pulled into the lounge and asked, “Can you believe this shit??”

The idea of not having a choice in whether or not you got married and had children was terrifying. (I was not yet necessarily critical of marriage as an institution, but I was heading there). What was perhaps the most distressing about the book was how women were made to think of themselves as martyrs to the causes of wifedom and motherhood, suppressing other desires and needs that made them full humans.

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the book’s publication, and there’s been various and assorted conversation around it. How far has feminism come? Have we accomplished anything? Are things better? (You know, not vague questions at all.) Read more

Posted on March 7, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism Leave a comment

Gender Focus Reads: Women Make Noise: Girl Bands from Motown to the Modern

by Josey Ross

Writing about Women Make Noise: Girl Bands from Motown to the Modern, edited by Julia Downes, is tricky. On the one hand, it’s a very good feminist history—inspiring, frustrating and exhaustive. On the other, it occasionally veers into territory too academic for pleasure reading and its commitment to shining the light on obscure girl bands can feel like a bit of a slog.

Starting with all-woman bands playing American Old-Time and Country music in the 1920s-1940s, going through girl bands of the ‘50s and ‘60s up through punk, post-punk, queercore, riot grrl and finishing up with Pussy Riot the authors paint a picture of the challenge girl groups face(d) in a very male-dominated industry, as well as the ways that women subverted gendered expectations and norms.

From the Ronettes of the ’60s navigating race and gender to ‘70s punk bad Ova opening a community music studio in order to “make music and music-making an accessible, demystified activity available to women as an empowering tool for social change” (p.120) to the Rock Girl Camps of the 21^st century Women Make Noise provides a forgotten history of the intersections of music and activism.

Tales of race riots, intimidation and abuse by male music fans and management, and inspiring moments of in-your-face activism provide fascinating background to some of your favourite bands (and many you’ve never heard of). The greatest strength of Women Make Noise is that many of the contributors were themselves part of the bands they’re chronicling. These women offer up inspiring, funny and enraging stories of being radical activists and prolific musicians in a world that worked constantly to push them down.

This is not a book for a casual music fan, it’s a book for lovers of music who want a deeper, richer history; for those who want to explore bands and feminism and the tiny and huge revolutions that women created by picking up guitars, learning how to care for and fix their own equipment, and being unapologetic in their demands to be taken seriously as musicians.

Posted on December 4, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture 1 Comment

GF Reads: Airbrushed Nation: The Lure and Loathing of Women’s Magazines

Airbrushed Nation Cover

by Ashli Scale

Like many girls, I grew up reading Seventeen Magazine, Cosmo and Vogue. Also like many girls, I had horribly low self-esteem and I hated by body. I spent hours agonizing over the models’ faces and bodies, wondering how I could achieve the perfection found in the glossy pages of my magazines.

No matter how much information I gleaned from the magazines about improving my body, dressing in style and enhancing my looks with make-up, nothing seemed to work. I even spent most of my allowance on cosmetics, clothes and diet products recommended by these magazines. No matter how much money I threw at the “problem” of my appearance I could not achieve what these magazines promised.

Many years later I read a book called The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. This book was a game-changer for me because it completely opened my eyes to the manipulation of the beauty, diet and fitness industries. I had always considered myself intelligent, savvy and a bit of a conspiracy theorist so how did I get duped for so many years? This insight kick-started my interest in the body acceptance movement so when I was given the opportunity to review Jennifer Nelson’s book Airbrushed Nation: The Lure and Loathing of Women’s Magazines, I was thrilled. Read more

Posted on November 22, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture 1 Comment

Feminist Book Club: Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Mary Wollstonecraft

This post is part of A Year of Feminist Classics book club. Visit their site to join the book club!

Confession: I’d already read most of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, starting in Grade 12 for an English project, and continuing in first year Women’s Studies at University. I found it really boring at the time so I didn’t re-read the whole thing. I did read the introductions to my edition, which I’d skipped a few years ago. Then I listened to the first six chapters in audio-book form. I have to admit that the more time passes since college the less I want to read books that feel like a bit of a chore, which this one does to me, purely because of Wollestonecraft’s overly descriptive style. So take my contributions to the discussion with a grain of salt.

I’m going to go through the discussion questions laid out by Amy on the book club website:

Were you as surprised as I was that the reaction was initially favorable to this work? And surprised at how devastating the repercussions of the memoir were? This question refers to the post-mortem publication of Wollstonecraft’s memoirs by her husband, which revealed intimate details of her life, including illegitimate children and suicide attempts. Apparently the initial response to her book was quite favourable until after her death.

The only reason finding out about the positive initial reaction surprised me was because she spent so much of the book nitpicking various writers, doctors, and philosophers. I have to say I skimmed a lot of this, as I was more interested in the overarching themes like the importance of women’s education, how women’s education fits into their role as mothers, the importance of education and free debate for a responsible society and government, and God’s intentions for women.

One part I found interesting because it evaded my notice on the first read was Wollstonecraft’s insistence that lack of education makes women flirty and coquettish, obsessed with beauty and thus not the ideal wives for smart husbands, or responsible mothers for future leaders of the nation. Today we see some of the same arguments, but without the concept of woman’s role being as a wife and mother. I’m thinking about books like Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs and other feminist treatises that look at how women dumbing themselves down and sexing themselves up makes them complicit in their own oppression. I have some issues with this argument, but it was interesting for me to see how it maybe had some roots dating back to Wollstonecraft.

Do you think reputation and life still matters as much for women in terms of their intellectual achievements? Would women’s works today be dismissed after details of their personal lives came out?

Amy’s reply to this question was a yes, and I’d probably agree. The first case that came to mind was the run for Congress of the awesome but unfortunately-named Krystal Ball, who was trashed after racy pictures of her at a Christmas party were posted on Facebook. Now, she probably wouldn’t have won the election, but a lot of feminist bloggers made pretty convincing arguments for why her indiscretions were given so much more attention than male candidates’. Another great example of the scrutiny on women’s personal lives affecting how their intellectual achievements are perceived would be the whole “is Elena Kagan a lesbian?” kerfuffle. The controversy around Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife Virginia’s political dealings barely compared to the media furor that surrounded the picture of Elena Kagan (gasp!) playing baseball.

But these are both political examples. I’d be interested to know if anyone has any examples of academics, writers, or other intellectuals that may have been unfairly subjected to scrutiny about their personal lives because of their gender.

-Jarrah

Posted on January 19, 2011 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism 1 Comment

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