I'm not a lady. By that I mean I have the XY chromosomes instead of the human default XX ones, not that I do things that violate the code of Victorian feminine gentility like walking around with my ankles exposed, talking in public with men not my husband and having a penis. Although all those things are true of me to. At least they are when I'm wearing sandals.
My life has been split into two oddly gendered halves, the first when I was younger, raised by a single mother and with two sisters and lots of aunts, very few men, and the second after I was grown and started my own family, consisting of myself and three man-children. There was a wife in there for a while, but we outnumbered her fairly quickly. My formative years in an estrogen-heavy environment left me largely unprepared for how to be a dude-parent to three nascent dudes, but it turns out OK, because I'm not sure I'd be satisfied with my efforts if I got done raising my kids and all I had show for it was three dudes.
More than a lot of men I think, I don't have much of that second voice in me, the masculine one that sounds an awful lot like our dads', urging us on to do something irrational and unproductive simply for the sake of establishing bro-ness. I've never punched a hole in a wall to punctuate a point I was trying to make in a debate of some kind. I've never ruined a perfectly good set of tires trying to draw elevenses in a rooster display of burn-outs. I've also never knowingly felt the need or necessity to announce to an audience of any kind that "Hey, I LOVE women!"*
The hard part of the last couple of weeks, intellectually I mean not emotionally or physically, has been in understanding that I'm exactly the audience that #YesAllWomen is aimed at. Because I'm not a misogynist (I don't think, though I'm open to evidence proving otherwise). I'm on the "right" side of all the relevant social issues like reproductive freedom, equal pay, anti-slut-shaming, nipple indifference, all the stuff Jezebel thinks is important, in that haphazard, ADHD way any of the Gawker media sites can focus on social issues. I'm sorry, my feelings on the new Taco Bell burrito wrapped in a quesadilla are just never going to be that strong.
I thought I was on the right side of the idea of "man-splaining" as well, but it turns out that the response that starts "Not all men...."--exactly the specific stance #YesAllWomen developed as a counterpoint to--is dismissive, all-encompassing man-splaining at its dumb, short-sighted worst. It's a shorthand for: "I'd love to help you fix your little problem, sugar-tits, but it's not me you need to talk to, it's the OTHER guy, he's the problem." Except the other guy? He's already a rapist. I don't know that we're going to cow him into alignment with a bullet-proof logic table of social responsibility.
First, there's very little to be actually proud of in coming to the grand self-realization that one finds oneself in a superior moral standing to a rapist.
Secondly, there's no real moral difference between "Not all men..." as a response to ingrained anti-female verbal, emotional and physical violence and "Well I never owned any slaves" as a response to racism. Or worse "some of my best friends are black," which, to understate it, has its limits.
What the movement is part of and what I'm noticing a bit more of is feminism co-opting the language and emotional markers of law-and-order conservatism: violence and crime perpetrated against women shouldn't be segregated as some kind of vague, miasmic social accident perpetuated by hot pants or the meaning in a glance or parsing out whether or not consent is implied by a woman being in a place where men also happen to be. Rape and domestic violence overwhelmingly affect women and we would merely like to point out: these things are crimes. On the one side, you have the socially maladjusted agents of evil and chaos who commit these crimes. On the other side, you have the broken and bloodied receivers of these acts, forced to endure the event and never-ending aftermath without ever possibly deserving it, since it is not actually possible for a human to deserve to be terrorized, beaten or raped. Or belittled. Or harassed. Or dismissed.
They came for me, next they are coming for your children!
It's a stark question to ask, uncomplicated, un-nuanced: are you with us or are you with the criminals? It's a mirror to hold up, where one half of the population has to turn and directly face the other half and realize that these aren't all isolated incidents and those at risk aren't in any way a minority, they actually constitute fully half of all of us. Well, no, sorry, that's wrong. It's actually closer to 51% to be honest.
---
*It's the gender equivalent of "but some of my best friends are black," except with a much healthier side order of dismissive condescension. Usually precedes a statement that knowingly or unknowingly dehumanizes women as a complete gender.
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
I'm probably going to use this statement (there's very little to be actually proud of in coming to the grand self-realization that one finds oneself in a superior moral standing to a rapist) as a come back to anybody who ever uses the "Not all men.." argument with me.
Also, insofar as I know you as well as anybody can know somebody whose writing they read once a week, and also I realize this is not exactly what you're talking about, but I'm glad you have three boys, because at the end of the day, I feel like you're probably doing a good job of raising them to be not-rapists, and not the kind of guys who will say "Not all men..."
The good/bad news is that I have no idea what kind of people they're going to turn out to be. I've never actually raised children before and I've only kind of got this one shot to get it right. None of them are making me feel like I need to waterboard them yet as a corrective action, so that's encouraging.
Post a Comment