Mean Girls, Part III: A Guy Walks Into a Bar

When I first started teaching, I used to ask my students if any of them were feminists. I'd get a few tentative hands, usually from angry-looking young women with short hair. I'd then ask who believed that women deserve the same pay, opportunities, and rights as men. All the hands would go up. I would smile wisely at my students and tell them that they were all feminists. I'd point out that the things I'd mentioned--equal pay, the right to own property, equal opportunities--were the essential tenets of feminism.

My students liked me, so they tried to be kind. They gently pointed out that feminism was the bastion of women in overalls with ugly haircuts and uglier shoes. Feminism was the rallying-cry of the man-hater, the supremacist, the bigot. Clearly, I was behind the times.

I, in turn taught them that what they were talking about was radical feminism, but that mainstream feminism was merely a push for equal rights. I think I swayed a few students, but most of us had to agree to disagree.

Over the years, my dedication to equal rights has grown stronger, but I have stopped teaching this lesson, largely because I think that my students might have been right. I think that the popular conversation regarding feminism has been co-opted by a radical feminist outlook. The goal of the women's movement no longer seems to be parity between the sexes, but rather primacy for women. Everywhere I turn, I see feminists making claims to moral, intellectual, and spiritual superiority. In other words, feminism has become exactly what my students claimed it was: an anti-male movement.

The saddest thing about this process is that the original goals of feminism have not yet been realized, and the battle for equal rights is far from over. There are still dinosaurs who believe that a women's place is in the home and that childbirth is punishment for original sin. More important, the literal enslavement of women is on the rise, with the sex trade kidnapping thousands of women every year, and the brutal treatment of women under fundamentalist Islam is horrifying. However, rather than mount a concerted attack on worldwide brutality against women, I see the women's movement in the United States wasting its energy by taking cheap potshots against men. On the rare occasions that it addresses the larger issue of female abuse and slavery, the primary goal seems to be to draw connections between women under burquas and women who feel insulted in the workplace.

Many contemporary feminists seem bent on becoming exactly the caricature that their conservative critics paint: shrill, humorless, sexist chauvinists with a cruel agenda. In the meantime, I have had to seriously reconsider my identity as a "feminist." If the feminist movement has become frankly anti-male, than any "feminist" male is, de facto, a traitor to his gender and himself. Now, I think that people, regardless of gender, deserve the same rights, and I refuse to prioritize one gender's needs over another's. Under the current situation, I think that makes me a "humanist."

Every so often, I think about Valerie Solanas. Best known for her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol, she was also the author of the infamous SCUM Manifesto. Largely ignored at the time of its creation, the SCUM Manifesto has become revered in some circles as a classic radical feminist tract. I see it as the most cartoonishly over-the-top anti-male statement ever committed to paper.

It is probably worth noting that "SCUM" stands for "Society for Cutting Up Men."

One of the key arguments in the SCUM Manifesto is the idea that men are genetically inferior to women:"The male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples."

This idea doesn't seem so radical anymore. In fact, I found it echoed in a couple of jokes floating around the internet:

What do men and sperm have in common?
They both have a one-in-a-million chance of becoming a human being.

What is that insensitive bit at the base of the penis called?
The man.


Solanas amplifies her argument that men are emotionally stunted sex maniacs, stating that "The male is [...] incapable of love, friendship, affection or tenderness[...]The male is, nonetheless, obsessed with screwing; he'll swim through a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there'll be a friendly pussy awaiting him. He'll screw a woman he despises, any snaggle-toothed hag, and furthermore, pay for the opportunity. Why? Relieving physical tension isn't the answer, as masturbation suffices for that. It's not ego satisfaction; that doesn't explain screwing corpses and babies."

Of course, one doesn't have to go far to see this vision of the romantically-challenged, bestial, sex-crazed man echoed in popular culture. Here are some jokes that make the same point:

What's a man's definition of a romantic evening?
Sex.

A woman of 35 thinks of having children. What does a man of 35 think of?
Dating children.

Why did the man cross the road?
He heard the chicken was a slut.


Solanas proceeds to argue that men are actually sub-human: "[The male] is a half-dead, unresponsive lump, incapable of giving or receiving pleasure or happiness; consequently, he is at best an utter bore, an inoffensive blob, since only those capable of absorption in others can be charming. He is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes..."

This idea, too, is echoed in popular culture:

What do you call a man with half a brain?
Gifted.

What's the difference between a new husband and a new dog?
A dog only takes a couple of months to train


One might wonder if, in Solanas' view, there are any good men. Actually, there are: "SCUM will kill all men who are not in the Men's Auxiliary of SCUM. Men in the Men's Auxiliary are those men who are working diligently to eliminate themselves, men who, regardless of their motives, do good, men who are playing pal with SCUM. A few examples of the men in the Men's Auxiliary are [...]faggots who, by their shimmering, flaming example, encourage other men to de-man themselves and thereby make themselves relatively inoffensive...

Of course, culture seems to agree:

Why is it so hard for women to find men that are sensitive, caring, and good-looking?
Because they already have boyfriends.


Solanas is kind enough to suggest a course of action for ridding the world of this menace: "Just as humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men. The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy.

Even this bizarre and brutal "final solution" has its echoes in contemporary humor:

How can you tell when a man is well hung?
When you can just barely slip your finger in between his neck and the noose.

How do you save a man from drowning?
Take your foot off his head.

What do you call a handcuffed man?
Trustworthy.


Perhaps I'm just being oversensitive, but it seems to me that one can only read so many of these jokes before the message becomes clear: all men are stupid, insensitive potential rapists. All men are guilty until proven innocent. The really funny thing is that these jokes didn't come from a Valerie Solanas fan site or a radical feminist blog. Rather, I found them with a simple google search for "men jokes." Once upon a time, one could be reasonably sure that brutally anti-male humor was the limited purview of a few half-crazed radicals on the outer fringes of society. Now, it seems like one sees it everywhere.

In Spreading Misandry, Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young outline six forms of misandry that are becoming prevalent in American culture. I'm not interested in rehashing all of them, but one form is male-bashing humor. Another is the common assumption that men have it easier, or are somehow cheating women.

I got a feel for this recently. Jean works across the hall from me. She's a nice person, if a little too quick to assign blame to white men. Still, we get along well. A few days ago, she told me that I looked thinner and asked me if I'd lost weight. I thanked her for noticing and mentioned that I've lost fifteen pounds this year. Her immediate response was to tell me that "You men have it so easy. All you have to do is exercise a little, and the weight drops right off."

Thinking of the hours I've spent in the gym and on a treadmill, the massive changes I've made in my diet, the gallons of water I've guzzled, I smiled and told her "Well, if women could restrain themselves, they might lose weight, but you girls are incapable of even the slightest amount of self-control."

Okay, I didn't really say that. What I really did was smile and went back to my office. I restrained myself for three reasons:

1. The comment would have been rude and mean-spirited; as much as I can be an asshole from time to time, I try to be a nice asshole.

2. The comment would have been untrue, and I'm smart enough to know that broad generalizations are unfair and unproductive.

And the real kicker:

3. You can't fight misandry with misogyny. Or, to put it another way, you can't hope to conquer prejudice with more prejudice.

Number three seems like a pretty simple equation. I'm surprised that it's so hard for people to understand.

Mean Girls, Part II: Marriage Penalties

A couple of weeks ago, Sam Roberts wrote in The New York Times that marriage was no longer the norm among adult women in the United States. His evidence was that 51% of women "said that they were living without a spouse."

In the days that followed, it turned out that Roberts had juggled his numbers in order to create this impressive statistic. For example, he defined "woman" as any female fifteen years of age or older. Additionally, he counted women whose husbands were incarcerated, employed in another area, or stationed in a foreign country (such as Iraq) as unmarried. Following Roberts' rubric, for instance, my wife is currently unmarried.

One wonders how many lesbians made Roberts' cut. What about nuns? Women in prison? Joan Rivers? RuPaul?

Although I appreciate some good number-padding when I see it, the interesting thing here isn't Roberts' sloppy journalism or the decline of marriage. What's really fascinating is the responses that his article produced. My particular favorite came from Gina Barreca, who wrote a piece about it for The Philadelphia Inquirer. I've got to hand it to Barreca: she's got style (or, at least, she knows how to copy it). Her article is liberally sprinkled with great pop-culture references, ranging from Mae West's comment that "marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet" to quotes from the Dixie Cups and the Beach Boys. However, once you get past the numerous cadged lines and television references, it becomes clear that Barreca has hasn't strayed far from the party line on men. She offers a collection of generalizations about "gargoyles" who take advantage of their wives, are childish, emotionally stunted...etc, etc. For evidence, she offers up Homer Simpson, The King of Queens, and other sitcom fodder. As the article progresses, it becomes clear that Barreca's argument is as cartoonish and two-dimensional as her examples. As she writes:

"Any man with a steady job, a history of reasonable sobriety, and the ability to cook one signature meal (either a red gravy for pasta, which they refer to as a "Bolognese" sauce, or a stir fry made in a wok they got from their last girlfriend) can find a woman willing to marry him. Guys who look like Notre Dame gargoyles can find wives who look like Isabella Rossellini. Think Everybody Loves Raymond. Think The King of Queens. Think The Simpsons. Meantime, women who look like Christie Brinkley get dumped for 17-year-olds who work at ShopRite or hookers named Divine Brown."

The real kicker comes when Barreca states that "The question, far as I can see, isn't why more women aren't marrying; the question is why they marry at all."

Ouch.

Well, thank god that Barreca isn't relying on stereotypes. For the record, I want to point out right now that I have never dumped Christie Brinkley for a 17-year-old, nor have I ever cavorted with a hooker named Divine Brown. I do not look like a "Notre Dame Gargoyle" (I'm nowhere near that buff!), and I didn't get cookware from my last girlfriend, as she used cheap-ass aluminum pots that had major hot spots. And, while we're on the subject, I fucking hate woks.

The scary thing is that Barreca is merely parroting what pop culture has endlessly repeated about men. It's hard to turn on a television, read a magazine, or watch a movie without being bombarded by depictions of stupid men being saved by their smarter, funnier, and more attractive wives or girlfriends. My wife and I tried to think of a positive depiction of fatherhood on television. She insisted that Friends filled the bill, while I argued that you really have to go back to the eighties to find a television father who isn't a fat, stupid slob. We agreed, however, that current TV is pretty much a wasteland when it comes to male role models. Except, of course, for reruns of The Cosby Show.

Glenn Sacks and Jeffery Leving offered a response to Roberts in The Chicago Tribune. In a nutshell, they cited statistics to show that, while men do less housework than women, they work longer hours in the office and that, in the end, the work loads of men and women are roughly even. I don't know if that's true, or if housework and office work can even be measured on the same scale. For the first year of my daughter's life, I was her primary caregiver, and I also did the lion's share of housework. Based on that experience, I am unconvinced that the frustrations and joys of child rearing and chores are in any way comparable to the difficulties of office work. Truth be told, I think that many men are probably getting off easy.

However, Sacks and Leving make a strong point about demands. They argue that many women have "excessive expectations" of their spouses: "Most marital problems and marriage counseling sessions revolve around why the wife is unhappy with her husband, even though they could just as easily be about why the husband is unhappy with the wife." In some ways, this rings true. My wife often tells me about her friends and their attitudes regarding their husbands. One popular refrain that I often hear is "I could do it on my own. I don't need him."

We could all do it on our own. None of us really needs anyone else. But is that the tack we want to take in our relationships? Does that seem like an effective bargaining position? One of the key elements of haggling is a willingness to walk away. However, it seems to me that we are far too willing to walk away from our relationships. No, you're husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/cocker spaniel isn't perfect, and never will be. However, neither are you, and regularly reminding your significant other of his or her shortcomings is not an ideal method for navigating the rocky shoals of relationship problems. Neither, for that matter, is letting him/her/it/Sparky know that you are ready to move on to the next relationship. To put it bluntly, we all want to be wanted. And, at the end of the day, being told that you are expendable does not inspire confidence, loyalty, and love.

Mean Girls

As I began wrote this post, I found it spiraling out of control. I realized that I had a lot to write on this topic, and that trying to fit it into a single piece wasn't going to work. Consequently, I've broken this into three posts, all of which are only moderately meandering.

A while back, the wife and I were shopping for school supplies at the almighty Wal-mart. As she searched for the perfect spiral-bound composition book and I sought a two-pocket folder that didn't look totally lame, I came across a brightly-colored binder with a childish drawing of a rocket. Looking closer, I read the words "Boys are stupider...send them to Jupiter."

Now, normally, I'd just be irritated at the unnecessary ellipses and the fact that a semicolon would have better set off the independent clauses (as some of you might have noticed, I am a militant supporter of the semicolon). This time, however, I was irritated by the message. As I searched through the binders, I found several similar covers, all equally upsetting (albeit free of inappropriate ellipses). There was the one that pointed out that "Boys are smelly":
And another one advanced the novel suggestion that "Boys are dumb":

Later, when I got home, I found out that the creator of these nasty little notebooks had gotten in trouble over another logo, which thousands of retailers had pulled from their shelves after Glenn Sacks led a protest against it. Here's what it looked like:

Okay, I admit that I have been known to engage in the occasional episode of bad taste, but there was something about this that made me really queasy. A big part of it had to do with the target demographic; while these notebooks might be ironically flirtatious if carried by college-age women, Wal-mart was marketing them to elementary-school aged girls. They were at child-eye level, mixed in with the Care Bears, Sponge Bob, and My Pretty Pony merchandise.

Not to get melodramatic, but I can easily imagine what it would be like for an insecure third grade boy to see this notebook in class. I found it hard to believe that people were actually putting these messages out there. Yet there they were, on sale at the Wal-mart.

This dovetails nicely with recent studies showing that boys are beginning to seriously underachieve in elementary and high schools. Apparently, the structure of a traditional classroom, with its emphasis upon self-control and independence, is not ideally suited to boys. According to this article from the Voice of America, 70% of poor or failing grades go to boys, and boys are far more likely to exhibit learning disabilities. For that matter, boys apparently lag about a year behind girls in terms of maturation.

When I first started teaching, academia was still in the grip of a nationwide struggle to improve the performance of girls in school. I was given numerous pamphlets and textbooks that instructed me to actively encourage my female students. I was taught strategies for increasing female involvement in the classroom, and advised to intensely focus on "drawing out" my shy co-eds. I remember being impressed at the level of attention given to student welfare; as far as I was concerned, the gender issue was secondary to the concern of increasing student engagement and being sensitive to student needs.

A decade later, the situation is rapidly reversing, and I'm not too impressed with the public response. Admittedly, I'm a little sensitive about this, as I was diagnosed with a learning disability in third grade. Like many other boys, I found it hard to organize my work and concentrate on my teachers. Years later, I discovered that I was not alone. In some school districts, as many as 40% of all students were diagnosed as either learning disabled or gifted and talented, which means that almost half of all students were unsuited for the mainstream classroom. The vast majority of these "learning disabled" kids were boys.

Admittedly, I have a problem with the entire issue of learning disabilities, but, apart from that, the diagnoses are so gender skewed that I have to wonder if this problem is sexism masquerading as science. If so many boys can't function in a standard classroom, mightn't there be a problem with the classroom, not with the boys?

Finally Done!

Today I finally finished grading. At the end of the semester, my students submitted over 1000 pages of writing. Most of it was pretty good, if I do say so myself, but I'm glad it's over. My head feels like I broke something, and my brain's rolling around like a marble.

It's good to be done.

Thank you to everyone who sent me a note while I was finishing off the semester; I can't tell you how much those little comments added up.

At the end of the semester, I camp out in my office, where I grade like a madman. As my students come in to drop off their papers, I take advantage of the distractions and have little talks with some of them. A lot of my kids just want to say goodbye, and reminisce over the semester, but some of them really want to have serious conversations.

One of my kids, who's been a little prickly all semester, decided that she wanted to have a serious discussion with me. The woman in question is in her early twenties, and is a local, which is a somewhat sensitive subject. While she realizes that Southwest Virginia is a little backward in its attitudes, she has a protective attitude towards it. It's like her retarded little brother--she makes fun of it, but gets a little upset if outsiders attack it. I can understand this, as I'm the same way.

In the course of our discussion, she told me, with granite-faced gravitas, that she's a feminist. She said this as if it was a revelation, or an admission of a lifelong vocation. I neglected to tell her that I, too, am a feminist, because I wanted to hear what she had to say on the matter. As we kept talking, I realized that my student's definition of feminism was pretty much your standard, college undergraduate, "women have been victimized for thousands of years and now it's your turn, buddy" defensive misandrony.


I treaded carefully for a few reasons. First of all, I have found that the sufferers of this particular delusion tend to be like sleepwalkers; if they awaken too quickly, permanent damage might ensue. Also, they often seem threatened by open discussion of their perspective, and react with defensiveness and lawsuits. So, anyway, I listened to my student list the same endless, ragged list of man's crimes against women. Foot binding? Check. Uncomfortable undergarments? Check. Domestic slavery? Check. Legal restrictions? Check.

Never mind that my student had never met a foot-bound, corset-wearing, housewife who had been legally raped.

(Of course, I'm only guessing that this is true. I thought about asking her if she had been foot-bound, or wore a corset, but decided that it would be in poor taste, and might be interpreted as a come-on. Besides, as she was blonde, blue-eyed, and had a southern accent, I thought the foot-binding thing was very unlikely. Also, she was wearing sneakers.)

In short, my student had internalized what a friend of mine calls "victimization trumping." This is the idea that one's value is dependent upon the degree to which he or she may claim victim status. Thus, a woman is more valuable than a man. Similarly, a gay person would be more valuable than a straight person, and a "person of color" would be more valuable than an albino. A non-christian gets more points than a Christian, and an amputee is be more valuable than a person with all his or her limbs.

Of course, in this particular perspective, a one-armed, one-legged, single, pregnant, african-american lesbian who worships Zoroaster would be the ultimate winner. She would have total bragging rights, and would reign victorious over her minions. At the very least, she could anticipate numerous offers for tenure-track positions at universities across the country.

Lest you think I'm joking...well, I am. But only a little.

Anyway, to my student's credit, she was willing to discuss these prejudices with me. She even laughed a little when I told her my personal solution to the prejudice problems of our society. I told her that prejudice will be solved when I am free to despise a woman, a gay person, or a person of color without reference to his or her gender, race, or sexual preference. Part of this, of course, is that gender, race, and sexual preference couldn't be used as a defense by the person in question.


I think the test case on this one is Condoleeza Rice. If I was free to hate Condi for her politics and her moral lassitude, without reference to her gender, race, or presumptive lesbianism, we'd be halfway there. If none of these three elements could be used to justify or explain away her moral failings, then the end of prejudice would be in sight.

I hope we get there within my lifetime.