Just finished reading The Wimp Factor by Stephen Ducat, and I thought it was pretty interesting. The book is an examination of the way that anxious masculinity is a driving force behind wingnuttery. It was interesting reading this book while I became the Bad Girl of the Week in the media, because I was reading the theory and living the practice. Ducat’s basic thesis is that boys grow up having a harder time than girls creating a positive gender identity, and therefore grow up too often to define themselves as Not Women, creating misogyny, war, etc. I think there’s little doubt that this is true, though the reasons it is true are in dispute. Ducat points to a number of factors, including the fact that child-rearing is gender-segregated, children are disciplined through abuse and the interesting idea that men suffer from “womb envy”. On the last point, Ducat has established some interesting evidence.
Regardless of you feelings about whether or not he’s got the right reasons for why anxious masculinity exists, his examination of the effects of it is right on the money. It’s not too much to say that without a large percentage of American men, many who are trolling Pandagon as of late, who have an indistinct sense of what it means to be a man and try to define themselves through phallic worship and misogyny, the Republican party would have no way of establishing an electoral majority. Masculinity is primarily defined as what it is not, so men suffering from anxious masculinity are constantly policing the borders to make sure they don’t experience being “feminine” by having tender feelings, admitting that humans are interdependent or even, in the worst cases, engaging with people in any kind of relationship that doesn’t feature an opportunity for such men to dominate. In addition, anxious men are always trying to force women into limiting gender roles, because sharing any role with a woman provokes such anxiety. Example: The ongoing denial from anxious men that women have sexual desire or that we have a right to it. If women embrace their sexual desires, then that means both men and women have sexual desire in common, which is emasculating to anxious men. So they either deny it or try to use legal mean like bans on abortion or contraception to force women to live as if we don’t have it.
It’s not a long book, but it’s jam-packed with interesting insights. I was particularly impressed with the way he broke down the two icons that represent women who threaten anxious males, the vagina dentata and the phallic woman. To oversimplify it a bit, the latter is a woman who doesn’t know her place and the former is a woman who breaks down men’s defenses. Go to any “men’s rights” website and you’ll find a mess of confusion, where The Feminists (who are basically any women who have a pulse) are often one or the other or usually both. The ongoing anxiety that most, possibly all, women are trying to “trick” men into fatherhood is the classic example of vagina dentata thinking. The fear of Hillary Clinton is such a classic example of the phallic woman that Ducat basically dedicates a chapter to examining the reactions and iconography around her.
Ducat also usefully goes down a list of basic issues and demonstrates how anxious masculinity tends to shape the debate about them, from war (if a war is viewed as penetrating and conquering another land, male support for it tends to go up) to the environment (think of how “stewardship” of the planet is considered a license to pillage by fundie nuts) to welfare reform (mothers who draw welfare get cast as reckless vagina dentatas, to say the least). Ducat is more interested in Freudian-style analysis of the effect symbolism has on people than on looking at the more rational forces behind certain stands on issues, but in this section of the book, he makes a pretty solid case that on these issues, at least, people are reacting very irrationally. The environment is the most clear-cut example of this. Supporting polluters who directly threaten your health (and ironically, one of the big threats is that men are absorbing estrogen mimickers that are literally, not symbolically, attacking their manhood) is simply irrational, but a lot of anxious men are unfortunately compelled by their fear of any female going unconquered, even if the “woman” is Mother Nature. The Iraq war was an exercise in mass stupidity, but Bush strutted around in a uniform and showed his cock off and the guys at Protein Wisdom, at least, are still totally infatuated.
Since the book was about the irrational anxious masculinity that is fueling conservativism in the U.S., it’s a little hard to quarrel with the fact that Ducat barely addresses the fact that there are a lot of rational reasons for some men to get involved in this sort of anxious masculinity-fueled dominance game. He does mention briefly at one point that there is a grain of truth to the idea that poor mothers probably do have more independence from men because of welfare, which contributes to a larger culture where women are freer from male control. These are not small considerations, but it’s not that Ducat is denying the more rational issues at stake so much as that’s outside the scope of his book.
Highly recommended, especially since I learned a lot of very interesting tidbits. For instance, I was so compelled by one little paragraph where he explains how a huge percentage more women say they vote differently than their spouses than men say that—which means a lot of women are lying about how they vote to their husbands—that I almost wrote a post just about that. So, for trivia junkies, this book, which is jam-packed with research, is a real blast.
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[…] Amanda at Pandagon offers an excellent review of Stephen Ducat’s The Wimp Factor: The book is an examination of the way that anxious masculinity is a driving force behind wingnuttery. It was interesting reading this book while I became the Bad Girl of the Week in the media, because I was reading the theory and living the practice. Ducat’s basic thesis is that boys grow up having a harder time than girls creating a positive gender identity, and therefore grow up too often to define themselves as Not Women, creating misogyny, war, etc. I think there’s little doubt that this is true, though the reasons it is true are in dispute. Ducat points to a number of factors, including the fact that child-rearing is gender-segregated, children are disciplined through abuse and the interesting idea that men suffer from “womb envyâ€?. On the last point, Ducat has established some interesting evidence. […]
Just went over to Amazon.com to see how The Wimp Factor (which I haven’t read) was fairing. As one might expect, the book has polarized Amazon reviewers. Hilariously, but not surprisingly, the one-star reviews are largely text-book cases of masculine anxiety.
So I expect that this post will be yet more Pandagon troll bait.
Oh well…by now Amanda and we are used to it.
I like the bit Amanda points out about women lying to their husbands about their votes. I’ve always suspected that was happening, and that many women — stay at home moms, undereducated, TRAPPED — were voting and lying to their hubbys to keep the peace in the household. Sorta like the abused waiter spitting in the asshole customer’s food.
Thank goodness for the secret ballot. I wonder if there is a trend of men trying to keep their spouses from voting at all, kinda like how we see the GOP launching campaigns to purge voting rolls of the poor and minorities.
I’ve needed a new book since I finished Collapse, thank you…
Hello Amanda,
Fine morning read, thank you. You were not at all on my radar until the recent troubles (heh). Now you’re on my personal dkos blogroll and I check in at least once a week. Or try: I’m glad to see I could get through this morning. A small sliver of a silver lining and I wonder how many of us are following suit. (sp?) Do you post polls or is it troll bate?
I’ve yet to drink my morning cuppa and already see that anxious masculinity, like fresh horses (v. barbarians at the gate or cavalry) will turn out to be a useful lens through which to look at the world.
Question: How would you guys feel about a book club? Like when a blogger starts a book, they put up a link to it in the sidebar and if you want to read with them, you can get the book? I suppose we could even have sort of “read by” dates. That might make the discussions post-review a lot more interactive.
As usual you crack wisest just as I leave work and my easy net access. Hope to drop by later today.
Meanwhile let me just say, I think the basic reason for our masculinist psychoses is that they function to create just the laundry list of nasty effects you check off. It’s a way of organizing society to create and support militarist patriarchy as a way of life.
The mechanisms that actually define and perpetuate this system are what is in debate. And alas, in trying to understand the cause-and-effect relations at work, so many scholars take the specific mechanisms as the primary cause.
Hence the confusion. And since the confusion is functional in perpetuating the system and clear understanding of the forces actually shaping it is not, the confusion is perpetual.
This kind of confusion is common in trying to understand interactive systems from an academic, essentially linear deductive, approach.
Try to explain the basic cycle of a gasoline engine in that way, for instance.
Thanks for reviewing this book, Amanda, I’ve meant to read it for some time. Freudians generally write really, really well, have interesting ideas and make wide connections — and usually go off the tracks toward Looneyville at some point. But at least their sentences aren’t dipped in sociologese, so they’re never *boring*.
I can’t remember if it was in Louise Kaplan’s Female Perversions (she’s another Freudian) or in a book (by a male author, maybe?) that is linked to Kaplan in my mind, but whichever Freudian it was pointed out that on trouble with dichotomous gender roles is that it restricts what virtues a person can practice.
As Ducat says, sharing *any* quality with women provokes anxious masculinity. Therefore, if feminism lets women cultivate intelligence, anxious men must act stupid. If some women are prudent, men must be reckless. If women do well in school, men must do badly.
I actually think this is where a lot of the anxious-masculine anti-environmentalism comes from. It’s not so much that women are associated with nature, but that women are encouraged to show qualities of caring for the future (especially children), of compassion, of prudence and restraint. So a male can only get guy-points by being reckless, greedy, wasteful, and short-sighted.
It’s a kind of subtractive masculinity, where the only qualities that make a guy a Real Man are ones women do not display. So if feminism lets women become more fully human, Real Men must become less — as though being human is a zero-sum game.
This is why we get so much “feminists deny the important differences between men and women! You think everyone should be androgynously bland!” When we say, “the truly important virtues are ones both men and women can display: honesty, courage, intelligence, compassion” they hear, “the important game is one that doesn’t define Manhood.” And in that way, of course, they’re right.
Speaking of Kaplan, one of her most interesting ideas is “homovestism”: getting a sexual charge out of dressing up as a member of one’s own gender. I think this explains a lot about what fashion means to many women.
I would absolutely love a blogging book club. Also, I am going to get this book, because it basically makes the same arguments that I have been making for a long time now, only with, you know, actual research.
Point taken, Mark. If you look at anxious masculinity as a self-propagating system, then it all becomes clear. Anxious men are the ones who are most likely to push for the social structures that perpetuate their particular neurosis, after all, like the obsession with soul-destroying “discipline”. Reading James Dobson’s stuff on raising boys is like reading a primer on how to raise neurotic, self-loathing misogynists. I mean, Dobson actually suggests that fathers take their little boys in the shower and show off the mighty giant penis to the boys. There’s some bullshit rational, but it’s obvious the real reason is to scare the boy, make him feel small and teach him that a hazy “emasculation” is the source of fear so that he polices his boundaries for the rest of the life for fear of never being emasculated.
There’s a lot of damage right there. The very concept of emasculation subtly denies that women have self-esteem or that we have one worth mentioning. A blow to self-esteem is characterized as a blow to Manhood, and women don’t have manhood, therefore no self-esteem.
Thanks for the recommendation, Doctor. I wishlisted it.
Meanwhile let me just say, I think the basic reason for our masculinist psychoses is that they function to create just the laundry list of nasty effects you check off. It’s a way of organizing society to create and support militarist patriarchy as a way of life.
I’m not entirely sure about that - I suspect that’s rather just a handy extra feature, rather than a deliberate strategy, although I’m certain that some rightist demagogues do consciously exploit it for all it’s worth.
As to actual root causes, I tend towards the views of Erich Fromm - being a real, individual person is hard work and kinda scary most of the time, so people tend to prefer not to bother, and look for alternatives. It’s kinda hard to sum up his entire thesis in a blog comment though, so I’d recommend reading “Fear of Freedom” (be aware that much of the pscho-analytical basis of it is entirely obsolete, but I’m not sure that invalidates the core thesis). I also think that Alice Miller has some very interesting and important ideas about the role of violence (physical or pschological) in child-rearing and its effects on the ability to develop a healthy personality. And what Alice regards as child abuse seems to be pretty much endemic…
Mass - my mom likes to tell the story about her grandparents - apparently, one was a Democrat, and one a Republican, so my greatgrandfather convinced my greatgrandmother that their votes would cancel each other out, and they should just stay home. Then, he proceeded to sneak out to vote himself.
This was Kansas back in the day. Apparently, my greatgrandmother also thought that Bob Dole was a very good looking young man.
“Speaking of Kaplan, one of her most interesting ideas is “homovestismâ€?: getting a sexual charge out of dressing up as a member of one’s own gender. I think this explains a lot about what fashion means to many women.”
Hm, I find that sort of fishy sounding. I think women in general have been so closely associated with sex in the collective culture (makeup, heels, advertising with naked chicks, etc, being required to look somewhat sexy just to be considered normal) that dressing very “femme” might provide a bit of a sexual charge just from being associated with sex in the mind, but not specifically from the clothes themselves. I’ve yet to hear of any men getting a sexual charge from dressing very “manly.” The reverse, on the other hand….
It may be more precise to say womens’ sexual *agency* is feared under patriarchy. Because you can certainly yearn passively.
It sounds like an interesting book. I wonder if it sheds any light on why the current model of masculinity is the mildly retarded proletarian oaf featured in ads for trucks, burgers, and candy bars. I mean seriously, *that* is the image of masculine supremacy? If that were my model for manhood, I think I really would be more anxious. It’s totally unconvincing as an image of power and authority.
I’d hope a book club could entirely bypass Amazon.com which is to independent booksellers what GE is to diversified media. I’ll spare you the rant. Powell’s Books in Seattle has a Partners Program that will generate an income stream for a site that links to them and Pat Holt maintains a page of independent booksellers with web capability, some of whom doubtless have similar programs.
http://www.holtuncensored.com/members/bookstores.html
http://www.powells.com/partners/partners.html
Duplicative Pingback on my blog. Re: Book Club: as Anakin Skywalker said, OMG sign me up!
wapsie - the misogynists are trying to define themselves as Not-Women. That is, they can’t share ANY characteristics with women, even the positive ones. So if we’re getting educated (more women graduate college these days than men) then they should stay dumb. If we’re dieting, they should get fat. It’s nuts, but it does explain the current “Manliness” definition, which I agree, on the surface makes no sense at all.
I’ve yet to hear of any men getting a sexual charge from dressing very “manly.�
Of course you have — look at the “Top Gun Bush” action figure that’s on the cover of The Wimp Factor. Think of cowboys, military and police uniforms, leather jackets, biker outfits, lumberjack clothes on guys who are totally not lumberjacks. It’s not just gay men who get a sexual kick out of super-manlyman outfits.
Count me in for book club. I don’t know how much I’d participate, but I’ll definitely graze.
I second Dunc’s recommendation of Erich Fromm, although I think the book he mentions is _Escape from Freedom_, which I just read recently, and it explained the origin of so many things I’d been puzzling over - mostly patriarchy-related. I think he and Alice Miller are getting at the same sorts of things, but Fromm (from what I’ve seen of his stuff) seems more hopeful. The Alice Miller stuff I read made me sick, and I eventually got rid of all of her books because I couldn’t bear to think of re-reading them. (She makes good points, mind you. But too many triggers to bad things from my upbringing.)
I’d like to be a part of the book club, too, if you decide to launch it.
I think a book club is a great idea.
me, me, I vote for a book club!! (I haven’t gotten any further in the thread past the point where Amanda suggests we have a book club so I have no idea if I’m the only one or not.)
Couple of random things, although I haven’t read the book fwiw —
“Masculinity is primarily defined as what it is not, so men suffering from anxious masculinity are constantly policing the borders to make sure they don’t experience being “feminineâ€?”
While I think this statement is fairly reasonable, I’m not sure the analysis is quite accurate. Perhaps this is a minor point, but I’m not entirely sure one can make any kind of conclusive argument as to exactly how masculinity is defined. One could just as easily say that masculinity is defined by things like stoicism, courage, physical strength, “rational thought/logic,” straightforwardness, dominance, sexual prowess, whatever. Of course, every one of these ideas has a negative flipside — sensitivity, cowardess (or simply discretion), weakness, emotional thinking, deceptiveness, submissiveness, sexual submission and so forth. In the end, it does not matter how an individual thinks about how gender identity is defined because the key is the anxiety. People who are anxious about their gender identity are likely to go out of the way to show the “positive” traits/actions that they consider part of what their gender identity should be and take drastic steps to avoid the “negative” traits/actions that they consider to be oppositional to their gender identity.
This phenomenon is going to exist regardless of how gender is constructed for as long as gender identities are considered to be inflexible and oppositional instead of flexible and complementary. It’s the anxiety in concert with oppositional gender outlook that creates this kind of person — not whether masculinity is constructed primarily by negative traits rather than positive ones.
(Just to clarify, when I say “positive” I mean defined as “is” rather than “is not” — I don’t mean to be placing any value judgment on any of the traits that I mentioned)
Also, as a person who has studied psychology pretty extensively, I get enormously frustrated by a lot of feminist criticism. Maybe it’s just the particular things that I’ve been exposed to, but it seems like a lot of important works draw deeply from Freud and post-Freudian psychology (ie: Lacan, etc.)
In the field of psychology, mostly everything directly related to Freud is now considered to be a joke. That’s not to say that his impact wasn’t incredibly important or that he didn’t have a lot of good ideas — it’s just that many of the specifics of his work and the work of his followers have been thoroughly discredited.
It’s not that I don’t like the overall arguments being made in books like this one or theory like Mulvey’s feminist film criticism — I do like them — I just can’t help but wonder why they would keep going back to Freud when there is so much better work out there to draw from.
So glad you finished the book, Amanda, and what great timing! I knew you would like it! And it fist so well with Lakoff - giving the developmental origins of what Lakoff describes in adults. Dobson all the way!
Of course, the war is all about penetration as our Prezdint said….
Doctor Science, up until you mentioned lumberjacks I was totally picturing the Village People.
Ugly in Pink also makes a good point. Proudly ignorant and self destructive behavior has somehow come to define manliness to far too many people. You point out the ignorance behind it and that is exactly what they want, in their opinion you are calling them strong. It’s bizarre.
Doctor Science - You know, that’s a very good point. I take back my first comment.
bookclub? Yes.
Also, if women have sexual agency, then the entire pursuit and capture (and rape) dynamic of modern heterosexual dating is invalid. After all, if women want sex, there’s no excuse for tricking them or forcing them into sex.
I guess my first thought is about ‘womb envy’ and how I’ve never felt the slightest desire to have a uterus.
Clit envy, on the other hand…
Men don’t actually want to experience the pain and awkwardness of pregnancey and childbirth, but they sure as hell wish they could create human beings. That power (dispite the negatives associated with it, and the ways that patriarchy exacerbate and construct more negatives with it) is the only way the human species survives; our biological imperative according to darwinism. It is awesome power, which is why the patriarchy (and other forms of male domination) works so very hard to control it. Of course, the clitoris is a fabulous part of the anatomy too.
It may be more precise to say womens’ sexual *agency* is feared under patriarchy. Because you can certainly yearn passively.
Well, social conservatives tend to say that women long for romance and men long for sex and that marriage is an exchange, sort of a market solution. They can’t admit men and women have anything in common, so they take the evidence that women have lustful feelings and say they are something else. This dichotomy, of course, creates serious problems for men in that their romantic love is contextualized as nothing more than a lie that they tell for pussy. It also is why people think that if women have sex with men without the wedding ring, we’ll never get married, because the idea that men could want to get married because they are in love is something that can’t be admitted to.
Poor Marcotte, projecting wimpiness unto others when your the biggest wimp of the week, maybe for the year. Your mission for Edwards was to appeal to WASP males who carry their forefatheres anti Catholicism within them, from the female pov. That is why you appealed to that anti Catholic vision that WASP carry about Catholics and having to many of those damned Catholics. Edwards liked it and thought it was excellent literature. Right Marcotte? And of course, you ran like a wimpering bitch Carolina dog wacked on the nose by a racoon when that male patriarch Edwards abandoned you. Now, you poke your scabbed nose out here in your virtual womb named Pandagon, barking louder and louder, to hide that wound from being a wimp.
Question: How would you guys feel about a book club?
Sounds reasonable.
Men don’t actually want to experience the pain and awkwardness of pregnancey and childbirth, but they sure as hell wish they could create human beings.
Yes, it’s called “fatherhood”. I wouldn’t mind being a father at all (I’m very conscious of the fact I have no children as time goes on); to call that “womb envy” is about as stupid as claiming that a woman’s desire for freedom and autonomy is because she’s jealous of men for having their genitals on the outside rather than tucked away.
Once puberty had its way with me I was never deeply insecure about my “womanliness”, but any remaining insecurity really did go away completely with my first child. I’ve also found that the fact that I’m a mother makes it very hard for other people to express any doubt about whether I’m a “real” woman. I can invoke the security of a traditional gender role, whether I believe in it or not.
So yeah, IME motherhood makes a woman much more secure in her gender role than a man is in his. Motherhood is something *I* do, efforts by the patriarchy and its lackeys to have me worry about whether I’m a “good enough” mother by some external standard have a kind of second-hand anxiety, compared to the true anxiety of masculinity.
Of the few things other than “not one of those icky women” that supposedly defined masculinity, pretty much all of the ones that ever existed have gone by the board in the US, making the misogynistic parts even more important.
Abe = exhibit A illustrating Ducat’s thesis. Way to go, Abe!!!!!
It ties into the whole authoritarian thing about how kindness = weakness, etc. It’s not just that the whole masculinity as wise, responsible, and learned is being poached by those awful women, it’s also incompatible with nuking TEH AYRABS, so must be dropped.
Wimp Factor…
You know that I think that Wimp Factor is one of the most important yet least appreciated books about ideology and politics in recent years. So, I was really glad to see an excellent review of it by Amanda: Regardless……
Odanu thinks being a women means not being a wimp. Marcotte is a wimp. She simply went looking for a job with a male WASP and should have never considered it unless she finds another male which she might have in common; Judas. Edwards is a male who uses women for his patriarchal needs and wants. After all, the man is married when marriage is a patriarchal invention used to deny women their true worth and value.
Marcotte is wimpering right now.
A couple of things real quick:
1. I love the idea of a book club. I got my library card up to date …
2. I can’t believe no one made a joke about Commander Codpiece’s trip the USS Lincoln and the Protein Wisdom love affair with him.
Now, on the meat …
My goal as a father is to show my son that you can be “masculine” without being an insensitive, physically agressive, misogynistic jackass.
I can’t tell you how many strange looks I get when I kiss my son or hug him in public. Part of that may be because I live in Kansas City (lots of conservatives around here), and the other part is that fathers just aren’t supposed to do that — we’re supposed to be big, tough, burly providers.
I look forward to the day when I can be a heterosexual man with all its trappings (the love of sports and beer, and the ability to burp the alphabet) without getting funny looks for also being a caring, loving parent.
And that day can’t come soon enough …
Poor Abe, having a piehole and not shutting it, the fucking fuck.
Interesting thesis put forth in this book Amanda. I’m definitely going looking for a copy.
Hmmmm. I wonder how all the stupid enhancement spams play into this idea of masculine insecurity? Is it that spammers think there is a market for their missives? Or are there legions of men out there who want a bigger one bad enough to respond?
As for abe, well, you can’t kick him in what he don’t have.
Amanda, Abe is boring. He has repeated the exact same thing in three comments now. You’re a wimp, I’m a wimp, everyone we know is a wimp. We get it. Now the magic ban baton, please?
What is the alternative, though? A war that is viewed as coming to the defense of a helpless ally against an invader (as Kuwait was framed) is going to appeal to anxious-masculine notions of chivalry. And a war that is genuinely self-defensive (a foreign invasion) is going to enjoy support for so many sensible reasons, it would be silly to attribute it to the anxious-masculine fear of being penetrated.
(On that last point, though, there may be some symbolic fear of buggery in the anxious-male fear of immigrants.)
So that leaves wars that are viewed as defensive, even though they’re waged on foreign soil. Do those really enjoy lower male support?
I guess my main question is, what actual wars enjoyed lower levels of male support, and how were they framed?
Time to educate Damnedyankee in cursing. When on uses the word “fuck” and thinks it is a curse/insult word is a failure of intellect. First, is fucking a pleasureable act? Now, think hard yankee. Hopefully you come to the conclusion it is. Fucking=pleasure. See that equation? Do you deny it?
So, when one goes about thinking fucking is a insult or to degrade another, one reveals your ignorance of how to degrade and insult.
So, let us review what you wrote to me.
“Poor Abe not having a piehole and not shutting it, fucking fuck”.
In truth you just want to give me pleasure evidently since the truth is that you just wrote to me;
“Poor Abe, not having a piehole and not shutting it, pleasuring(fucking) pleasure(fuck)”.
You should have written “non-fucking fuck” and that would have been your desire to deny another person a pleasureable act. I do assume you do not want to pleasure me, do you Yankee, since that would make you nothing but a object of desire, and that is a damnable curse.
A book club is a great idea.
Poor Marcotte, projecting wimpiness unto others when your the biggest wimp of the week, maybe for the year. Your mission for Edwards was to appeal to WASP males who carry their forefatheres anti Catholicism within them, from the female pov. That is why you appealed to that anti Catholic vision that WASP carry about Catholics and having to many of those damned Catholics. Edwards liked it and thought it was excellent literature. Right Marcotte? And of course, you ran like a wimpering bitch Carolina dog wacked on the nose by a racoon when that male patriarch Edwards abandoned you. Now, you poke your scabbed nose out here in your virtual womb named Pandagon, barking louder and louder, to hide that wound from being a wimp.
I was going to reply to this with an “Amanda, I’m boooooooooored”-style call for banning, but this is genuinely brilliant. Pandagon appeals to WASP bigotry! Yeah! You’re like a dog that crawled into its womb because it got hit by a racoon!
We should keep this one around, provided he mixes at least three independently hilarious metaphors in every post.
Abe is the reason that fundamentalists make bad beat poets.
Abe at least has not started to repeat himself. Yet. In this thread.
As to how to insult, generally it starts with composing readable, even lyrical prose. However, he stumbled over a gem of wisdom right at the end there:
“would make you nothing but a object of desire, and that is a damnable curse.”
Yes, yes it is.
Poor Abe, having a piehole and not shutting it with delicious pie. You could be eating pie, right now, instead of flailing helplessly about trying to insult, but managing mostly to inspire thoughts of “racoons? What the bleeding hell?”
That’s okay, Abe, I forgive you for not being in on the joke. Thank you for providing such a wonderful example of the easily-pricked male ego.
Kinda skimmed the comments so I don’t know if anyone posted this yet, but it relates nicely to the homoerotic subtext of anxious masculinity. Glad to see you review The Wimp Factor, I read it a year and a half ago and loved it.
I’d be really interested in a book club, though hopefully the books chosen won’t be as obscure as Twisty’s. I literally went to every single bookstore, including all the little hidden one-room pagan, used and feminist bookstores, in Ottawa which happens to be Shulamith Firestone’s city of birth, and couldn’t find a single damn copy of The Dialectic of Sex. Even at the university library there was only one copy, which has been consistently checked out.
Ok, link didn’t work. My HTML skills are the lose. Here it is plain:
http://alternet.org/blogs/peek/#48264
One must think before one uses the word “fuck” in a sentence, and Marcotte should know that from being a deep thinking intellectual to her mind puppets.
All that “fuck you”, wording, which issue forth from Marcotte, and her admiring puppets, is simply from either being devoted to the sexual act of “fucking”, being a insult. A appeal to insult, from using pleasure as a insult, is exactly what rape is. So, every time you write the words “fuck you” to another, your appealing to that deep well of getting pleasure while insulting the dignity of another. And that is masochism at its base level. Marcotte is a masochist who enjoys using the word “fuck” as a insult to fulfill that desire within her to degrade, insult, and enjoys the pleasure she gets from being a masochist. Now, Marcotte, “object relations” came from liberal thoughts on sexual development and your thoughts on blow jobs to fucking exhibit what becomes of one’s mind when sex is used as a insult to another by using the word fuck to often whille forming your thoughts. So, pleasure you Marcotte, and I do mean that as a praise to you, since giving pleasure is a noble act.
You know, I don’t know that I ever really thought much about the idea that being a male was defined as NOT being a female. It makes so much sense! It’s brilliant.
As for the comment that masculinity is defined by rational thought and feminity by emotional thinking, that is complete and utter bullshit. Men have been spouting this crap for millenia, all the while doing completely irrational things.
Just because women talk about their feelings more, doesn’t mean that men don’t have them and act on them. They just find other ways to justify their actions that make it seems that they’re being logical.
Here’s a typical irrational male:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpozspIMH9E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu26bTJRAGM
You should have written “non-fucking fuck� and that would have been your desire to deny another person a pleasureable act.
Didn’t the Geneva conventions outlaw such blatant torturing of logic and semantics. Thank you for being the most deliberately obtuse troll I’ve seen all month. That really takes some effort.
Now, see about that piehole of yours, mkay?
Abe. Piehole.
What kind of waste of skin, when he gets drunk and rambunctious on a Tuesday morning, gets it into his head to troll feminist blogs and try to frighten the commenters by straining to look smarter than them? Jesus, man, if this is all you have, I feel for you.
Banana cream, pecan, key lime…the choices are seemingly endless! Oh the joys of pie-eating! Because honestly i’m not seeing what you’re getting out of this whole “I shall dribble incoherent insults in a neverending stream of verbal diarrhea! THAT will surely show them!” thing.
Phoenician, I didn’t go into it, but Ducat makes a compelling case that there is very literal womb envy in some cultures, and it correlates strongly with women’s oppression. In some cultures, men even go through “labor” when their wives do and, surprise surprise, they take longer to “recover”.
What is the alternative, though? A war that is viewed as coming to the defense of a helpless ally against an invader (as Kuwait was framed) is going to appeal to anxious-masculine notions of chivalry.
Turns out if a war is framed as going in to help people, male support declines and female support goes up.
Bye, Abe, you have bored me for the last time.
I don’t understand people who natter on about being “a real man” any more than I get people (and often, they’re the same people) who go on about being “a real American.”
To me, it’s not complicated: You’re an American if you were born or naturalized here, and you’re a man if you have a Y chromosome and the requisite plumbing.
Hmmmm. I wonder how all the stupid enhancement spams play into this idea of masculine insecurity?
Shit, they’re selling stupid enhancement now? That explains a lot…
I was going to say that Abe was ruining a thread about anxious masculinity and how our culture is filled with men so mentally weak or equipped with such tiny dicks that they have to overcompensate by being complete assholes.
But then I realized that Abe is, in fact, the very example of men like that. so maybe he’s serving a greater purpose after all.
Although, it would be nice if he’d go fuck himself.
I wonder how Ducat’s theory accounts for the construction of masculinity found in some American subcultures, most notably sXe. (For those fortunate enough to have no awareness of this movement, they’re basically hypermasculinized, punk rock vegan environmentalists. Despite the fact that they still discuss environmentalism, veganism, etc. in testosterone-heavy narratives, they’re still very liberal.)
OK. I’ll buy it.
But not because I’m a wimp.
Marcy -
As for the comment that masculinity is defined by rational thought and feminity by emotional thinking
If that was referring to me, I should probably make it clear that I don’t believe that at all, it’s just the stereotype I was referencing. And, imo, men and women would talk about their feelings equally, if there were equal pressure to do or not to do so on both genders.
Well, at least W. has finally gotten his revenge for that 1987 Newsweek cover story on his dad. He said he would make us all pay, all of us, just you wait — and sure enough, he showed us! Why, he even showed Ariel Sharon what a manly man does to Osama bin Laden, though I can’t talk about that here, because I don’t want to offend the godbags.
Oh, and pie is pleasure. Mmmmmm, pie. I can smell it cookin’ right now!
Fatherhood is. not. the. same. thing. It’s called parthenogenesis (the ability to reproduce alone) and men want it real bad. Look at Walt Whitman’s writing; look back to the Greek myths — Zeus created Athena by himself (in some versions) to show up Hera. Men *are* jealous of wombs because they want the power of creating children for themselves. It’s worse now because women can basically create a child without a father - yeah they need some sperm from some donor, but not a father in the picture (or in their body). This ability makes men nervous. This is coming from someone who refuses to reproduce herself.
M. -
Interesting. Are they still misogynist, or are they equally lefty across all topics? Militant male feminists would be…(fans self) oh my.
thanks Amanda. Mmm pie!
Does Ducat speculate as to the source of masculine anxiety?
If so, does he follow the Freudian route or take a different tack?
If he references Alice Miller, i’d be very impressed. Freud is so played out.
M, Freudian analysis works better at talking about general trends. Sort of by definition, people who deliberately queer up the narrative are not going to be part of that.
How would you characterize the attitudes towards intervention in Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda and the Sudan? The GOP opposed US operations in each case, and I think it’s the case in the years in which these crises took place that the GOP would here represent the anxious masculinity perspective. While I see the chivalry reference in Kuwait, it perhaps may have applied as well in some, if not all, of the crisis situations. But it was not a framework that caused anxious masculine types to support intervention. Often the framing was that the US should not be the “world’s police force” and that the US should not “nation build.” The impetus for intervention in most cases was to stop ethnic violence, a more abstract concept than a territory grab. Perhaps, therefore, the idea of intervention seemed more like cleaning up someone else’s mess, and cleaning is womanly, beneath an anxious masculinist’s attention? Hard to say, but that’s the kind of military intervention that was (a) not supported and (b) not framed in a way to indicate penetration was at issue.
To continue your thought about self-defensive wars like foreign invasions, two wars were fought with the framework of stopping foreign penetration, and others were supported (covertly or not) with the same attitude — all having to do with the penetration of Communism. Korea, Vietnam, supporting the Contras — even up through the coup attempt on Hugo Chavez — have all been to avoid the creeping penetration of Godless Communism(tm). Do we think that the rational arguments for intervention other than the penetrative fear were overwhelmingly oriented in sensible self-defense in those cases? Perhaps we did have a great deal to rationally fear for the forms of Communism practiced by the governments that took it on during the Cold War — I wouldn’t want to live under Castro or Kim Jong Il at any point — but it’s worth discussing how much the “Domino Theory” was used to stoke the fires of anxious-masculine fears of penetration with respect to those wars.
It’s also worth noting that the chivalry as practiced with respect to war and helping out an ally is framed too in an anxious-masculine way. WWII has been framed as the “good war,” where we had the right attitude — liberating the French, say, from the Nazi regime. And even now, any contrary voice from France is considered an uppity, insufficiently-generous one, because we did it a big favor 60 years ago. A chivalrous war may be even more popular than a merely penetrative one, because not only do we, as an anxiously masculine country, get to prove our manhood by kicking another penetrator’s ass, but we get to feminize the liberated country, setting it up as another “other” which we are not, never having needed to be liberated ourselves.
I’ve already gone on too long, but considering all this puts the 9/11 attacks in a very different light as well.
I in no way speak for my entire gender, but having watched The Mrs. give birth, I can assure that is NOT something I ever want to personally experience.
Now, that middle part of pregnancy where the kid is moving and growing may not be so bad — you know, right after the morning pukes and right before the little bugger starts using the bladder as a trampoline. But I wouldn’t say I’m “jealous” of it.
It just occurred to me, though, that this crowd may be able to answer — is there anything that men do that is comparable to “womb envy”? Something physical, not societal?
I mean, writing your name in the snow is overrated, so I’m sure I’m missing something …
Unholy Moses: Architecture.
I envy men’s easier time of it building muscle and losing fat. Or at least I did when I was still lifting.
There’s also lack-of-a-period envy. That one’s a biggie.
arianna, for what it’s worth, i saw firestone’s dialectic of sex in the women and children first bookstore in chicago. maybe you can order it?
http://www.womenandchildrenfirst.com/
Another take on that period of time might be that they wished to deny Clinton the chance to be the “manly” CinC in those situations. That would go a long way in explaining the Repubs fighting tooth and nail in each case.
Ahhh … that is a good one.
Note: Just remember that some men have a good attitude toward menstruation …
;-)
this is actually kind of funny, because i’ve been bedridden for 2 days due to illness and working on my thesis. between this, i’ve been devouring edisodes of “oz” like nobody’s business. now granted, i just watch it for its’ convoluted subplots, totrtured acting, over-the-top violence, homoeroticism and brief glances of male genitalia.
if anxious masculinity had its’ own t.v. show, it would be “oz.”
I’d have ordered a copy from elsewhere ages ago if I had a credit card.
Seriously, last I checked even monster-sized have-everything Chapters didn’t have a copy :/
Arianna, I believe Firestone’s book is out of print, or close to it. I had to get one on Ebay a few years back.
I suck at teh html, so here are ugly links to 3 sources:
http://cgi.ebay.com/The-Dialectic-of-Sex-by-Shulamith-Firestone-1979_W0QQitemZ4562336010QQihZ002QQcategoryZ378QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem
http://cgi.ebay.com/The-Dialectic-of-Sex-by-Shulamith-Firestone-2003_W0QQitemZ330090648863QQihZ014QQcategoryZ378QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem
http://cgi.ebay.com/The-Dialectic-of-Sex-by-Shulamith-Firestone-2003_W0QQitemZ330090649970QQihZ014QQcategoryZ378QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem
(I didn’t know Twisty covered that one! I don’t normally read her, but I may have to go check that out.)
There’s always your public library. The one I work at even lets you reserve titles online.
Good job.
Great posts…
I usually think I have something smart to say that hasn’t been..
Often disappointed and shouldn’t [here he goes again];
So, the usual conditional…’but’
1)If we think of male as embryologic/developmental ‘tweak’
on the female ‘template’..a lot of the base anxiety reveals itself.
Male is ‘existentially’ just a little but ongoingly ‘uncomfortable’.
Paglia would say ‘incomplete’ but we hate her here….so
2)The Shrinks have a code/terminology book [should remember, don’t]
from which they expunged ‘homosexuality’ long ago.
They need now to ADD ‘manlihoodness’…really!
3)Recent RSS clip rounded on that - boys/men are every bit as ‘romantic’ as
girls (of whatever maturity).
I believe that to be true…just avoidance/denial goin’ on
4) Glad the boss is back
And while I don’t feel like I suffer from “womb envy”, I do have a terrible case of “not-having-Larry-the-Cable-Guy-allegedly-speaking-on-my-behalf-on-the-basis-of-my-gender” envy.
Public library has ONE copy, reference-only, at the downtown branch.
I really did look literally everywhere. I even bugged some womens studies profs.
I encountered this just after reading this post, in fact.
I ran into an acquaintance and chatted with him about an assignment we had for a class neither of us considered important. “I had this really cool idea planned out, but then actual classes called, so I guess I’ll just slap something together,” says I. “Yeah,” he says, “write a poem. Or have a girl do it for you.”
The thought that struck me immediately thereafter was that poetry has historically been a pretty masculine activity, but as soon as women are allowed to do it - whammo! - off the list of Approved Things Men Can Do.
The anxiety surrounding masculinity is pretty impressive. I’ve recently developed an MRA troll infestation on my blog (my fault for daring to criticize them, I’m sure). They attribute all of men’s problems to feminism, when some are clearly rooted in the construction of masculinity. I’ve had an astoundingly circular discussion with one who says “family courts are biased against men, because they don’t see providing as parenting.” When I point out that perhaps a solution to this might be encouraging more gender-balanced nurturing, so that fathers weren’t relegated to the role of “provider,” he seems not to even hear it. The idea that gender roles are anything other than natural and immutable is incredibly threatening to these people.
Like, you put a listening device in their office bugged? :p
OMG Ponygirl, you made me laugh at work
I just got the most hilarious mental image of me running around, paranoidly planting bugs through the whole women’s studies office building incase they were hoarding books behind my back
P.S.
I still think ‘Patriopathy’ might also be a decent working term…
for to go in that shrink book
[but ’till now hadn’t even thought of the ‘Patriot’ component…hmm?m.].
Phoenician, I didn’t go into it, but Ducat makes a compelling case that there is very literal womb envy in some cultures, and it correlates strongly with women’s oppression. In some cultures, men even go through “labor� when their wives do and, surprise surprise, they take longer to “recover�.
Bugger - another book to add to the list.
Fatherhood is. not. the. same. thing. It’s called parthenogenesis (the ability to reproduce alone) and men want it real bad.
And women just want to be mothers and housewives and leave the breadwinning to the male, right?
We’re getting awfully close to the Pit of Foolish Generalizations with this particular assertion. Greek myths and Walt Whitman do not men in general make.
Arianna: That was the image going through my head too!
Then I started to imagine the confrontation scene.
Fortunately, the people I work with are used to me giggling inanely at my desk for no apparent reason, so they just shook their heads and ignored me.
Well, here I am at the library and the wireless connection is running slow. Either that or my laptop is overloaded, what with trying to copy the soundtrack of Hair into my iTunes library and keeping open a dozen Netscape windows.
Glad to see Abe is gone. I generally just skipped over his contributions. Though it did cross my mind to point out to him that, political enemy of the Know-Nothings or not, Abe Lincoln was also quite the anti-Papist in his own right. I wonder what effect that would have had on him…speaking of frail masculine egos and all.
I generally feel I never convey my concept of the patriarchial system very well. A key part of the idea is that it works as well as it does in reproducing itself precisely because it isn’t a conscious conspiracy, necessarily. I think of it, like most aspects of society, as a system that evolved “behind the backs” of people. Structuralist, post-structuralist, and post-modern scholarship in general emphasizes the sheer arbitrariness of social conventions. In doing so I think it goes too far, but it is true that both human societies collectively and individuals also exhibit a tremendous range of possibile ways of conceiving and perceiving things.
However I think a sort of Darwinin selection principle, which operates on the materialist fact that individual people, and societies integrating them, can only be doing a limited number of things at once and must make choices and prioritize to get anything done in the material world, and there is a minimum need to materially produce what is essential to survive to enforce this. Thus societies often “reason” conventions out through trial and error.
Human beings of course can try to understand their way of living the way they do everything else, and develop mental models they are always refining to better solve their problems. But reason doesn’t always reign supreme because it often happens that the truth is an ugly thing, and yet not amenable to immediate change. It is disenheartening to face grim situations that don’t seem to have any immediate remedy., and almost as bad to realize that one is perpetuating misery on others. And those who would ruthlessly exploit every advantage handed to them have few compunctions against using that dismaying aspect of the truth to terrorize their rivals and those they seek to keep in subjugation. Nor do these cynical types need to have a clear understanding of every aspect of society in order to exploit the ideology that evolves to patch over the discrepency between the world as we wish it might be and as we find it. It often serves well to have only a partial understanding and be blind to other aspects of society that are crystal clear to outsiders.
I think that at a specific time, between the initial development of agriculture and the foundation of what we call “civilization” in general, and the beginnings of those phases of recorded history that we are very familiar with, there was a vast social revolution, essentially a long chain reaction through the entire sweep of incipient civilizations of the Old World, which had reached a metastable state of vulnerability after thousands of years developing societies pretty much directly from the old gatherer-hunter mentality. On the basis of a set of world-views that perpetuated old values of sharing, reciprocity, balanced mutual respect for all individuals, the arts of civilization were invented, but their success enabled a new mentality, one based on seizing and concentrating control of the economic surplus this material progress made possible. A new logic, one based on a set of big lies, developed during a dark age that passed between the initial rise of human civilizations and the oldest phases of it that are continuous with historical memory–because there was a time of social “cleansing,” of censorship of oral tradition and the purging of social memory, and the development of the basic Machiavellian arts of exploitive civilization. Only after a millenium or more of brutal trial and error, with more than half of human hands tied behind their backs as the systematic downgrading of women in general, along with evolving systems of hierarchy that tended to blight creativity and understanding in general, did the new system, the one we think of as the historical norm, emerge.
Since that time, societies have been characterized by a hostile tension that gives rise to cycles of repression, dooms peoples to predicatable self-immolation in ill-conceived military misadventurism, and casts a general pall of fear, hatred, and bad faith over people’s lives.
This we take as normal. I don’t accept it as fundamental human nature. I call it a system. But I don’t think some genius or gang of Snidely Whiplashes have stood aside from history and maliciously foisted it on us all. I think it evolved as a possibility, and the system of aggression has aggressively sucked all the qxygen out of the room in its relentless slef-perpetuation.
To be sure, there have been genius ideologes, along with the merely clever and the credulous, who have given some thought to the system and, accepting its premises, have refined it. But the system of the militaristic patriarchial dominator model of societies has also had to evolve defense mechanisms against the too intelligent and perceptive, because its liabilities are drastic and visible. It has been important to the perpetuation of the system that critical thought be guided and diverted from certain chains of reasoning, and since the essence of the system is to arbitrarily concentrate wealth and power in a few hands, and the possessors of those hands and the resources they control are trained to be jealous and greedy, and to fear the jealousy and greed of others which they project on those they rule even as they give their subjects rational reasons to chafe, it has been possible for the system of class rule to prioritize its survival imperatives over clear vision and the human desire for a peaceful community where everyone is accepted. Thus the intellectuals of a dominator society are valuable but risky,and must learn to walk a tightrope so their thoughts are useful and profitable to their betters without dropping sparks on the ever-present powder keg of mass resentment.
If you want to raise your kid a Republican, tell him “God didn’t put that there to play with,” and give him a gun.
The thought that struck me immediately thereafter was that poetry has historically been a pretty masculine activity, but as soon as women are allowed to do it - whammo! - off the list of Approved Things Men Can Do.
This is an ongoing theme of mine whenever I see on of those Burger King “I Am Man” ads which show just how reductivist the idea of masculinity has become when only the shittiest tasting food is considered manly.
According to the Ad World version of manhood, any activity beyond letting your ass grow huge while watching sports and porn on TV is faggy. In short, the concept of masculine has been redefined to embrace the softest, most weak ass version of maleness ever.
Regarding The Dialectic of Sex, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Bookpeople (here in Austin) all seem to be carrying a 2003 reprint of it.
One has to wonder - how many men in the GOP own a cat? Because, as a male with liberal political leanings and three cats, I have the sense that those men who identify themselves as Republican or conservative would view cat ownership as being a ‘wimp factor.’ I certainly don’t, but it popped in my head after reading this post.
Ah yes, the deep cravings of ‘womb envy’. Geez. It appears that this site is little more than a collective effort in male bashing in order to achieve the perceived aura of ultimate liberation. It’s interesting to see those who don’t have spouses, don’t have children (I have three daughters) and have absolutely no idea of what marriage is like, attempting to educate the rest of us on these subjects. It should also be pointed out that twenty something females attempting to inform the rest of us about ‘maledom’ is incredibly ridiculous and patently absurd to begin with.
Well, I think this post might have answered my question…
Thanks for your thoughtful analysis, ekf. The point about feminizing the nations to whose “defense” we rush is especially good.
I honestly have a hard time analyzing the reaction to the interventions you mention, because I can’t help but confound patriarchal motivations with partisan loyalty. Which is to say, how much was the GOP opposition to Bosnia and Somalia a product of their anxious masculinity, versus how much was about who the Commander in Chief was at the time?
As has been pointed out frequently, the lying liars will take completely opposite positions depending on which President orders the intervention.
Anyway, I should probably look at Ducat’s book to see the approval statistics that Amanda is citing.
I see troll reading comprehension is down again.
IS, we’re discussing Stephen Ducat’s book, wherein is discussed the idea of “womb envy”, among a great many other things. Ducat, btw, is a 54-year-old male clinical psychologist with a wife and child, so by your patronizing metric he is perfectly free to discuss these matters.
As are we, whether you like it or not. Shut your fucking piehole.
“Thus the intellectuals of a dominator society are valuable but risky,and must learn to walk a tightrope so their thoughts are useful and profitable to their betters without dropping sparks on the ever-present powder keg of mass resentment.”
Beautifully put.
PR, there is such thing as some sort of womb envy, but yeah, it’s not there in every man or there to the same degree. In fact, Ducat has interesting evidence that it correlates strongly to sexism—the more sexist the man/culture, the more likely there is strong womb envy. There’s a lot of theories why, but to my mind it might just be as simple as some sexist men can’t stand the idea of women besting them in any way.
Hey…Infidel…
Almost 70 here, 5 kids, married 20 years…mostly happy.
Also ex-Marine, oil-patch roughneck, orthopaedic surgeon
and played rugby in Johannesburg…
Don’t insult the good people here…you demean yourself.
So, keep it to yourself .. puppy.
Mark…I like that.
All that I took in…some minor percentage probably.
But I think you’re right…it’s all ’systemic’, if that’s the right word.
And Sara Robinson to whom Amanda introduced us (or me, at least)
made it very clear that to make ANY sense of so much of a lot of stuff
like weather or economies….and all like that
You have to think, ’system’.
And that’s not easy or pat but it takes one in ,more or less,
at least, the right direction.
[I just learned, for example, that ‘recursive’ and ‘iterative’ were cousins…
and they both go to ’system’.]
And so the patriarchy is embedded, attitudinal and, of course, ancient…
but it’s not a conspiracy.
So thank you for that. I’ll reread it. Later, maybe.
I see troll reading comprehension is down again.
They don’t read. They see trigger phrases like “womb envy” and that sets them slavering about how angry and miserable they are. Notice how genius there didn’t actually address anything in the post, but went off on how much he hates whatever he thinks feminists talk about.
[…] I’m usually skeptical of attempts to connect many different ideological components that happen to go together in a current political alliance. I haven’t read The Wimp Factor, but my general impression of it, based on Bora and Amanda’s reviews, is negative. […]
PR, there is such thing as some sort of womb envy, but yeah, it’s not there in every man or there to the same degree. In fact, Ducat has interesting evidence that it correlates strongly to sexism—the more sexist the man/culture, the more likely there is strong womb envy.
Okay, okay - I’ll read the book. If I get a B on my course this semester due to lack of work, I’m blaming you.
Okay.
Somehow I’m unsurprised that you’d be fascinated by the trivia, too.
Gee, Infidel Sage, I guess I better give up my areas of specialization- masculinity and imperialism- because as a woman (who is married with a son and almost always agrees with Amanda’s assessments) I simply can’t pronounce on what it was like to be a man. I guess that goes equally well for the top names in my field, many of which are women. Does this mean I have to go into women’s studies now?
And while we are at it, I suppose nobody other than African-Americans can speak about anything related to blackness; only Catholics can talk about being Catholic; men have to stop talking about womanhood; etc. ad nauseum.
You’re right, it’s Amanda who is patently absurd here.
I swear, the trolls lately are like talking to five-year-olds…but at least five-year-olds have an excuse for their ignorance.
But does it have a hemi? You need to start early if you are going to make sure your offspring are manly masculine and know what products to buy. Like, you want a hummer with that tofu?
BTW Infidel Sage, your handle is like so totally gay! Makes me think of bad 50s and 60s Shiek of Whatever movies with lots of bare-chested oiled guys with no bellybuttons showing.
Reading the comments here, I am reminded of a wonderful discovery I have made. Most of the feminist men I know seem to like themselves better — they seem to be more at peace. A great majority of the macho, male chauvinist assholes I know are in a constant inner turmoil they can’t keep from oozing out all over others like lava from a volcano.
Anti-feminist trolls are a good example of this. Why are they so angry? Stephen Ducat wrote a very interesting book. Some folks — myself included — agree with most of what he said. Others don’t. But the anger from the predictable, male-supremacist quarters is white-hot and well nigh homicidal.
Patriarchy can’t deal with truth. It has to do its damnedest to suppress it. Even the potentially-liberating fact that men would be happier if they stopped blaming women for everything but sunspots and smallpox is considered an idea so threatening it has to be kept in the dark.
Small boys tend to be very nice people. As a former tomboy, I played with the boys in the neighborhood all the time, and found I actually enjoyed their company more than that of most girls my age. A little boy can be a very loving, loyal, adventuresome little soul. Patriarchal societies take as many of these nice little creatures as possible and turn them into monsters.
It makes no sense to me.
There’s a lot of theories why, but to my mind it might just be as simple as some sexist men can’t stand the idea of women besting them in any way.
Or having anything they don’t have - a kind of jealous, hoarding view of life. This is something you see a lot of in the arguments against so-called affirmative action - if someone is getting a fair shake or some kind of redress it must be at the expense of the traditionally privileged. I’ve yet to find a middle-class white guy who’s actually suffered because of social justice, but I’ve met plenty who are aggrieved about it.
“It’s called parthenogenesis (the ability to reproduce alone) and men want it real bad.”
Agreed. Unfortunately, I think the term “womb envy” is throwing people off. Maybe “creation envy” is more appropriate? There is certainly a male drive to control reproduction and that didn’t start recently. Great point above about Athena springing from Zeus’ head. That made me think about Genesis. Even as a child I thought the tale of Adam and Eve was backwards.
Eve would obviously have been made first as she could then birth Adam. Except, of course, if Eve had come first and she was made in God’s image, then God is a woman.
Which, IMHO, makes perfect sense.
From my observations of actual men, rather than theoretical ones, the defining and enforcement of patriarchal norms is not based on Freudian fearas and envies, but rather:
social hierarchy.
The pecking order.
The boys who beat up other boys on the playground define what characteristics make other boys less “sissy”. They beat up smart boys, not necessarily because girls are getting good grades, but because stupid boys envy smart boys who are climbing the hierarchy in another way. Eventually, most boys either learn to buy in to the patriarchy or reject it, as it devalues important aspects of their humanity. Those who buy in may then develop the fears of femininity, emasculation, etc, because they fear losing status.
has_te: “They need now to ADD ‘manlihoodness’…really!”
In fact, someone tried that! Dr. Deborah Caplan was involved with the last edition of the DSM, and got very annoyed that “Masochistic Personality Disorder” was added with a “wink and nod” by the other (male) committee members, over her own protest that the symptom list exactly replicated the effects of long-term abuse. Her initial response was to coin a diagnosis dubbed “M.A.C.H.O. Personality Disorder”. I don’t remember how the acronym unpacked, but the definition was pretty much what it sounds like. “The boys” didn’t much like that… She wound up becoming disaffected with the whole DSM process, and writing a book titled They Say You’re Crazy denouncing it.
Skipping to the end to say, should you need just one more voice to tip the balance (ha!), that I’d be in for a book club too. As long as you don’t pick things that are only published in the States.
The most recent one I could think of was Kosovo. The wingnuts were incensed about it. Not for any rational military or foreign policy reason, mind you, but because it involved Bill Clinton and that meddling buncha girly men known as the U.N. The whole concept of a United Nations is an affront to their fragile masculinity. Amurrikans shouldn’t have to get no permission from no Kofi Annan to bomb nobody!!
A textbook example of Anxious Masculinity in action has been the “real man’s” reaction to the WNBA.
Like a good many Phoenix dykes, I have been a diehard fan of the Mercury (and the entire league) since the beginning ten years ago. And I have been absolutely blown back against the rear window by the G-forces of male hostility over womens’ professional basketball.
My stars, you’d have thought somebody had canceled the NBA. And that men were being force-marched, at gunpoint, into arenas around the country, tied into the seats with their eyelids super-glued open, and MADE to watch womens’ basketball.
All because now we can have the sort of fun men have been having for decades. Aren’t we mean! It’s gotta be a sinister feminazi plot.
Is it because women are getting paid to play basketball (as paltry as their salaries are in comparison to the mens’), or simply because they are, at long last, getting some real recognition for it? I am really not sure.
Like a good many Phoenix dykes, I have been a diehard fan of the Mercury (and the entire league) since the beginning ten years ago. And I have been absolutely blown back against the rear window by the G-forces of male hostility over womens’ professional basketball.
Which is wierd, given that netball aka “women’s basketball” is the no. 1 women’s team sport in Australia and NZ, and common throughout the Commonwealth. Hell, the Silver Ferns are news here on a par with most rugby matches - not the All Blacks, of course, but there we’re getting into religion rather than sport.
Is it some sort of a race thing?
I don’t think defining masculinity as a sort of anti-femininity covers anything but a portion of the source of male insecurity. The competition between men, the toxic “culture of honor,” and the extreme narcissism that underlies the male identity in our society are things-in-themselves, not reactions to real or imagined female characteristics. The effect of patriarchy on women draws deeply from this foundation — I don’t think woman-fear is the sole motivator (though from a woman’s perspective it may as well be).
In my secret heart of naïve idealism, I’ve always felt that humanism, stripped of its sexist underpinnings (i.e. a strong whiff of patriarchal self-justification that some “humanists” have burdened it with) is really the only way out: gender roles are no more than roles, and differences between the biological sexes should generally be given no more weight than other differences between individuals. We’re one species, with endless variety. Biology is only one determinant of who and what we are. But, of course, as a practical matter following this tack makes no more sense than pretending that race makes no difference and so we must be colorblind. Like racism, sexism exists, and must be confronted. Toxic masculinity must be opposed, not just ignored. And thus it must be understood for what it is — which is more than just male fear of female power.
[…] Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 in miscellaneous by Daniel Larison It’s not too much to say that without a large percentage of American men, many who are trolling Pandagon as of late, who have an indistinct sense of what it means to be a man and try to define themselves through phallic worship and misogyny, the Republican party would have no way of establishing an electoral majority. Masculinity is primarily defined as what it is not, so men suffering from anxious masculinity are constantly policing the borders to make sure they don’t experience being “feminineâ€? by having tender feelings, admitting that humans are interdependent or even, in the worst cases, engaging with people in any kind of relationship that doesn’t feature an opportunity for such men to dominate. In addition, anxious men are always trying to force women into limiting gender roles, because sharing any role with a woman provokes such anxiety. Example: The ongoing denial from anxious men that women have sexual desire or that we have a right to it. If women embrace their sexual desires, then that means both men and women have sexual desire in common, which is emasculating to anxious men. So they either deny it or try to use legal mean [sic] like bans on abortion or contraception to force women to live as if we don’t have it. ~Amanda Marcotte […]
boys grow up having a harder time than girls creating a positive gender identity, and therefore grow up too often to define themselves as Not Women, creating misogyny, war, etc…
It’s not too much to say that [ ] a large percentage of [ ] men … who have an indistinct sense of what it means to be a man [ ] try to define themselves through phallic worship and misogyny
… so men suffering from anxious masculinity are constantly policing the borders to make sure they don’t experience being “feminineâ€? by having tender feelings, admitting that humans are interdependent or even, in the worst cases, engaging with people in any kind of relationship that doesn’t feature an opportunity for such men to dominate. In addition, anxious men are always trying to force women into limiting gender roles, because sharing any role with a woman provokes such anxiety.
OK, and yet somehow the way men use and demand the woman-hating, violence, othering, dehumanisation and hierarchies made explicit in, say, porn, has Nothing Whatsoever to do with any of this.
You know, like the fact that male soldiers “need” porn (’cos they’re just kids and boys will be boys and anyway they might die, so we can’t possibly begrudge the poor little wankers their daily dose of misogyny-for-Real-Men before they go off to knock around their female comrades or the “enemy” in general. Nope, porn is just harmless fun really, no influence, no reflection of male fears and hang-ups, just no connection there at all).
Join the dots ? Hello ? Anyone ?
Re: Trivia and basketball- Basketball was actually first invented as a “delicate” sport for women! The very first organized basketball teams were womens college teams- they had their own leagues.
Then, men see it and take it over and all of a sudden it’s no longer ok to be a woman and play basketball. It was our game first, buckos!
I will read this book. Sounds very interesting, and I am out of books to read right now.
And, IMO, a book club would be awesome. Give us at least a couple weeks to read it though, as it can take some of us a while to unpack lit (even those who gradauted magna cum laude in college, like me). I will be there, possibly with bells on.
In the sports vein, it’s rather amused me the last decade or so, to see how the USA women’s soccer teams keep dominating, while the men’s teams are minor league compared to the rest of the world. Got me thinking first about why the countries that are traditionally seen as soccer powerhouses are also traditionally seen as heavy on the masculine culture. So, women in those countries don’t have the opportunities to develop skills for that sport. But, for some reason, our country has decided that soccer is a sport for pussies, literally or figuratively. Certain sub-cultures of American society value soccer, and encourage boys to keep playing it after elementary school, but the dominant culture trivializes it.
Not that I really know much about soccer, just commenting on what I’ve seen of its trivialization here in the States (and the King of the Hill episode where Bobby joins the soccer team really sticks in my mind, as Hank Hill is a good Everyman). I’m willing to declare it to be an interesting sport, based on its popularity in the rest of the world. Just always been interesting to me how soccer was left to women in this country, and they literally took the ball and ran with it.
But, for some reason, our country has decided that soccer is a sport for pussies, literally or figuratively.
Interesting, given that American football is often perceived as rugby for people who like to pose in padded uniforms and stop every five minutes for a commercial break…
Subgrrl 8, that’s exactly right. The sport of basketball owes its very existence to women. Its inventor, Dr. James Naismith, was a phys ed instructor with both womens and mens classes to teach. It was cold where they were (in Canada, I believe), so during the winter they had to stay in the gym. From the unlikely mating of a peach basket and a volleyball, basketball was born.
Funny we hear so little about that today — or that the first teams were womens’ teams. Just like most other things to which women contributed, it has been simply airbrushed away.
For god’s sake, keep it that way! If the US, with its well-funded sports teams and athletic citizens, starts getting involved in football (soccer, to you non-Brits) there’s not a hope in hell that England will ever win the World Cup again.
Well, there’s not a hope in hell of that anyway, but at least this way I can still pretend…
Regarding homovestism, I think I do feel a bit sexier when I’m wearing somewhat formal stuff like a suit and tie, if it’s all well-fitting and clean, and suits, jackets, and ties are thought of as distinctly masculine so maybe I’m a male homovestite.
Interesting. I suppose you could say I have womb envy, in that, if I think about it, I think, “y’know, being able to get pregnant and have a kid would be cooler than not being able to, if I had reasonable control over it.” Oh, and I’d also like to be able to fly, turn invisible, and all that. I mean, the more cool abilities I’d have, the better!
I don’t think of my womb envy as particularly sexist, and I suppose that, at least imagining abstractly, if I were a woman, I’d have a corresponding mild case of penis envy (”Yeah. Being able to control my piss better, have sex-using-a-penis, and being able to impregnate people, if I had reasonable control over it, would be cooler than not being able to.”). However, I suppose that maybe if, instead of regarding being able to give birth as one of many things that I can’t do (along with telekinesis, being able to see perfectly in complete darkness, etc), and thought of it as a usurpation by women of some role that’s so awesome and important that it really should be reserved for men, then maybe I’d resent women, which is where the sexism comes in.
I don’t know. It’s intriguing.
OK… Despite my slow male synapses, I get it…
Being “Manly” is the worst kind of misogyny possible.
Opening the door for a woman is tantamount to oppression…
Men are horrible, confused idiots that secretly want to be women (womb envy) but at the same time we want to be everything that is NOT a woman.
What a brilliant thesis!
Lying to the husband about the voting record is a “good” thing? What about a relationship based on honesty, openness and mutual respect?
OH MY GOSH!!!! What a bunch of “victims”!!! Man Up already!! Oops! Wrong term.
BTW - Book clubs are cool but can we read something balanced… O’Reilly perhaps?
OK… Just kidding about O’Reilly being balanced.