In the following I use italics for pheeno’s words, and bold for Ampersand’s and joe’s. My words aren’t marked up.

The conversation started here:

I should clarify. I wouldn’t want [Condoleezza Rice] to win [a hypothetical run for Presidency], but it would be way cool if the final face-off were between two women or two blacks.

Two blacks??

Two black WHAT, if you don’t mind?

Her point was well made, and I conceded it immediately:

Two black people.

The matter could have ended there, but it didn’t:

Then try describing them with the fact they’re PEOPLE in mind and not a just a freakin color.

Now I was already a bit irritated, because I didn’t think that I did have this in mind. But I nevertheless Stayed calm and took the criticism seriously. To quote Amp:

…do not dismiss it without thinking about it. Especially if the criticism comes from a person of color - people of color in our society tend by necessity to be more aware of racism than most Whites are, and pick up on things most Whites

So I check my privilege:

OK. I checked my privilege. Now what?

Now stop acting like you don’t know better.

I’m not acting. If it looks like I don’t know better, then I either don’t know better, or I just don’t agree with you.

In this case, I do agree with you that it is better to say “black people” than “blacks”, which is why I responded as I did in #26.

I don’t agree with your #28 to the extent that it implies that I think of them as colours rather than people. I do not. I do agree with #28’s criticism of my language use, but I already conceded that. It was from laziness, not from thinking of them as colours, that I wrote “blacks” instead of “black people”, and I will try not to be so lazy in future.

Is there anything else that I should have understood from this conversation?

There was a brief digression, then the conversation continued:

The point Daran is that you did objectify. It doesnt matter that you did it because you were lazy, the affect is still the same. Your reasons or excuses for that language are irrelevant. They don’t change it, they don’t soften it, they don’t excuse it.

I understand that. But … [i]f my reasons are irrelevant, then why mention them in the first place? I stated the real reason, not as justification or excuse, but to correct your misstatement of my reasons. It is important to me that my reasons for saying the things I say are not misstated. If you wish to take me to task for my language without getting into an argument with me about my reasons, then do not misstate them. Either state them correctly, or do not state them at all.

To sum up:

I acknowledge that I used objectifying language to refer to Rice and Obama. My reasons for doing so are irrelevant. I have stated that in future, I intend to use non-objectifying language when referring to black people. That intent is also irrelevant except in so far as it leads to my actually using non-objectifying language in future.

Is there anything further we need to discuss?

Telling you to keep it in mind means

dont be fucking (lazy, ignorant, forgetful, priveleged, jackassy) from now on. It doesnt matter if it was lazy, ignorance, privelege or jackassery when you wrote it. Just fucking stop it.

Get the difference yet?

Now Amp intervenes, allowing pheeno the last word:

Since Daran has already said a couple of times that he does intend to keep it in mind, I think that should be an end to it.

Well thats nice. I dont.

Once again, inent was thrown out there as if it changes anything.

It doesnt.

Here’s joe:

Daren never said that his intent changed anything. He said that its only relevance was to correct your statement about his thought process.

Which I’ve explained doesnt matter. It’s merely another show of privelege to go onto to “correct” my statement about his thought process. That’s one of the affects of one’s words. That is part and parcel of the impact his words had. POC are no longer obligated to “understand” white people’s laziness, mistakes, ignorance or hate. We’ve been well aware of the myriad excuses for some time now. Trying to “correct”us or explain it to us just continues on with the insult. We aren’t the ones in need of racism education.

Finally Amp shuts it down again, having given pheeno three free shots at me.

Yes, but this isn’t your blog (and I note that you didn’t disagree with me that the argument had become circular).

I agree with you entirely, by the way, that intent in a case like this doesn’t matter. Which makes it even odder that you refuse to drop the subject.

The subject of Daran’s intent is closed on this thread. Next person to bring it up, either to defend Daran or to attack him, is banned from the thread.

I also agree with her entirely, so what exactly is pheeno’s problem?

The answer lies in the last thing pheeno says here. This has nothing to do with my entitlement, and is all about hers. She apparently feels entitled to comment on my thought processes, without me responding. Moreover, she seems to feel entitled to do so on someone else’s blog, even after the owner has told her to stop.

Who exactly is the privileged one here?

Discussion reopened.

Update: Contrast the following remark made by me in the comments:

More interesting to me is the entitlement she asserted to appropriate my authority to represent my thoughts.

which is a statement about what she did, with this remark from the post:

She apparently feels entitled to comment on my thought processes, without me responding. Moreover, she seems to feel entitled to do so on someone else’s blog, even after the owner has told her to stop.

In which I speculate about her thoughts.

Continuing with that speculating, its possible that she doesn’t feel safe enough to respond here. If so, then this post has had the practical effect of appropriating her authority to represent her own thoughts.

There hasn’t been a meaningful comment here for many weeks now, and monitoring the spam has become a pointless chore, so I’m closing comments. If you need to contact me, you can do so at Feminist Critics.

If I reactivate this blog for any reason, I’ll reopen comments at that time.

In a comment, to my recent post David Byron said:

I’m not interested in how you got to this specific web page. I would be more interested in how people became attuned to the discrimination against men that goes on since that is what is unusual about people here.In particular I wonder how many have had a Child of the Glacier style experience, vs those who didn’t see any anti-male discrimination until they got hit with it like a brick as an adult (eg divorce). How many were aware of these issues and formulated them out of their own mind vs how many had to read about them from someone else to become aware.

I’m personally curious about how people found the two blogs I started. I’m also aware that there’s been little substantive blogging on FCB recently, on my part because of all the stuff I’ve been doing setting it up. So that post was intended to be nothing more than a bit of light entertainment pending something more substantial.

He asks a good question, though, and his own reply is worth reading. My earliest recollection of consciously observing (and objecting to) a gender norm dates to about the same age, I guess, as Adams was. That would put it in the early seventies. I noticed, (and remember complaining about to my parents), that bad things almost never happened to women in the action/adventure films I watched on TV. They never got killed on the battlefield or in the wild western shoot-out. They didn’t fall into pits of boiling lava, nor did they ever get eaten by dinosaurs. They might get captured by the baddies, but the baddies never did anything actually bad to them, and they always got rescued anyway. Men, by contrast, got casually wasted in their scores.

Even younger - six or seven I guess, I remember being very apprehensive of being put into a class with a male teacher. It wasn’t that any man had done anything bad to me, but that I simply had never been in the charge of any man except my Dad, and of course, he was away at work most of the day. Up until then, all my carers other than him had been female.

Other early childhood memories which may or may not have had a gender element were that I always felt in the shadow of my older sister, who was always physically bigger, more capable, more socially successful, and seemingly favoured by my parents. How much of that was gender, and how much was age and how much was my being Aspie is hard to tell.

I have a vague memory of wanting to do something girly, and meeting with the disapproval of my father, though I don’t remember what it was I wanted to do, or how he expressed that disapproval.

I also remember feeling totally unprotected in the face of the schoolyard bullying I was suffering, that nobody would take it seriously. (Of course, nobody had taken it seriously, that I was aware of. All they had done was pass the buck explicitly back to me.) I didn’t connect it to gender, though, but to childhood. I felt that, as a child, I wasn’t important enough to protect.

Like Hugh, I could never flirt as a teen or even a young adult. It wasn’t until my late 20’s that I ever flirted, and it was a real ‘Gosh, I can do this’ moment. Even now, I daren’t initiate.

Also in my late twenties/early thirties I had my first encounter with feminist hostility toward male-survivors I describe some of these incidents in this post, and in a couple of the comments.

What I never did, as Adams appears to have done at a very early age, is join the dots. Instead I swallowed the script as it has been fed to me: Women were the disfavoured sex; it was men who are violent toward women, not the other way about (my personal experiences of violence by women notwithstanding); men received favourable treatment in court. Etc. It wan’t until I found usenet in 1999 that I first encountered rightwing antifeminists/MRAs, the kind that David calls Chauvinists. What an eye-opener that was!

My first reaction was that their behaviour was appalling, and their purported facts seemed absurd. My second reaction when I tried to defend feminism from them, was that they were well prepared for the argument, and I wasn’t. I had to wise-up and educate myself. Some of their alleged facts stood up. Other’s turned out to be garbage, but many feminist claims fared no better. After a while, feminists and antifeminists came to look more and more like mirror images of each other, and I realised that I could not in good faith defend feminism while excoriating the Chauvinist antifems for their misogyny.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

(Crossposted between Creative Destruction, DaRain Man, and Feminist Critics.)

(Crossposted between all three blogs I write for.)

It all started for me, with a link from The Register to Seth Finkelstein’s Infothought blog. I found him to be an interesting, somewhat out-of-the-box thinker, so began reading him regularly. Sometime later Lis Riba popped up to ask his advice on getting a high Google Rating for one of her pages. And so she became my second regular read in the blogosphere. High on her blogroll was Alas a Blog. (I knew there was a reason for giving your blog a name beginning with ‘A’.) Unable always to comment as freely as I would like there, I began to comment on Creative Destruction. Shortly thereafter, a messenger arrived at my door bearing a handwritten missive enscribed upon the finest vellum, and laid upon a silken pillow, exhorting me to become a blogger here. (It was either that, or Amp sent me an email, I don’t recall which.)

At that time, WordPress automatically gave you blog if you created an account with them, and obviously I needed an account to blog at CD, and so the blog that was to become DaRain Man was born. I started substantive blogging there after being evicted from Alas during a little flamewar, and I realised that I needed an independent platform of my own. Later when Aegis/HughRistik accepted my offer to co-blog, it was clear that our joint enterprise was going to outgrow the ‘personal blog’ concept. We decided go for a dedicated URL and hosted environment right from the start, rather than go through the agony of changing addresses later, when we were established. Hence Feminist Critics was born.

That’s my story, but how did you get here?

Is anyone still here?

Hugh and I are starting a new blog focussing on feminist criticism, gender politics, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

In about an hour’s time, (Edit: five minutes) I will close comments in the most active feminist posts/comment here, in preparation to copying them to the new site. (It would be better to close all comments, but I can’t find an easy way of doing that.) Any comments you post after that to any feminist-related thread may not get duplicated, and may be lost altogether.

As soon as the new site is up and running, I will post the URL here.

In Part 1 of this series, I observed the tendency of feminists to throw around the term “oppression” without defining it, or explaining why only women are “oppressed,” but never men. Yet I have encountered a few feminists who do believe that men can suffer gender oppression. In this post, I will discuss a differing feminist view.
Read the rest of this entry »

I said:

Here’s where I think feminists have a point: Women are constantly being told “watch out, you’re at risk”. Men don’t get that message, despite the fact that we’re the ones at most risk. Consequently, women fear violence more than men, and it curtails their behaviour in a way that men’s aren’t.

Of course, it’s the feminists doing most of the fearmongering…

Snowe:

That has not been my experience at all. All the wacky “advice” about how to prevent stranger rape and abduction has come from my very conservative family.

“Most” was a baseless, and hence Odious Comparison, and I withdraw it. I should have said “some”. As Robert said, it comes in variable formats. Here are some feminist birds in your garden:

Maia worries that a newborn girl might be victimised some day. She worries that a newborn boy might become a victimiser, but it never occurs to her to worry that he might be victimised, even though the risk to him is higher than for a girl. Not content with scaring her own readers, she posts the same on Alas. Q Grrl posts rape stats higher even than found by Koss, twenty years ago. The incidence of female rape has fallen in America by a third since then. Richard Jeffrey Newman says that “women, as a class, have to worry about being raped and sexually assaulted in a way, and to a degree, that men as a class do not”. Not merely that they worry more, (which is true), but that they have to.

Your very conservative family may have given you wacky advice, but at least they don’t blame other people for their own fearmongery.

So what’s the real situation for men and women? The National Violence Against Women Survey, a study which didn’t survey prisons, nor the homeless, nor others living in institutions where these attacks are most common, still found one male rape victim for every three females raped during the survey year. (Thanks to David for reminding me of this) When you take this undercounting into consideration the ratio is probably closer to 1:2 or even 1:1. Then consider that men are much more likely to face non-sexual violance and about 20 times more likely to be murdered.

But Richard is still right about men. They don’t have to worry, and neither do women. Rape is a truly crap thing to happen to anyone, but it only one of many crap things that happen to everybody at some point in their lives our lives. But you can recover from it. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s not even close.

So don’t listen to the wacky advice; take sensible precautions instead. Then go out and enjoy yourself. Enjoy your female privilege which is your relative immunity to violence. (I don’t begrudge you that. I object to feminist denial of it, but I woudn’t want women to face more violence, just to make it eeequal.) Then, if your taste runs to men, go out and find some nice ones, and have yourself a good time with them.

Do all of this in the certain knowledge that at some point in your life, and probably more than once, something really, really crappy is going to happen. It probably won’t be rape, but it will be something. Be prepared for that, but don’t worry about it, because whether it’s rape or something else, you will be able to deal with it when it happens.

I’ve always been confused the notion of “oppression” ever since I started hearing the term. When I was growing up and getting bullied, I was hearing how girls have all the problems. It seemed that just about anything bad that happened to women could be considered “oppression,” no matter how minor. Men were never said to be “oppressed” no matter what bad things happened to them.
Read the rest of this entry »

I was gratified to see my co-blogger on ‘Darain Man’, Hugh Ristik, refer in his last post to the “Odious Comparison“, one of a several phrases I’ve coined to describe some of the objectionable aspects of feminism. Just as feminism has its own vocabulary, including such terms of art as “Patriarchy” and “Rape Culture”, so we Feminist Critics need a vocabulary of our own. Ideally each concept should be described by a memorable word or two word phrase. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. Some of these terms I have been using for a while; others, so far, have existed only in my head; still others I’ve coined even as I drafted this post.

Gendersphere: The entire field of philosophy, discourse, and activism that attends to gender, including, but not limited to feminism, antifeminism, Men’s Rights Activism, and Feminist Criticism.

Feminism: A self-defining segment of the Gendersphere. A feminist is a person who is recognised as a feminist by other feminists.

Pro-feminism: Men who are unwilling to call themselves feminists (or who are not recognised as such by some feminists) because they are male, even though their views are indistinguishable from feminism.

Contrafeminism: That part of the gendersphere that is broadly in disagreement with or opposition to feminism.

Antifeminism: Extreme contrafeminism. An essentially oppositionist stance.

Men’s Rights Activism: A movement devoted to improving the position of men in society. While this is basically a positive stance, the movement is infested with antifeminism.

Feminist Criticism: My term for my own philosophical position, and for the similar views of other people. The phrase is deliberately ambiguous: A feminist critic could be a critic of feminism or a feminist who criticises. I want to carve out a position within gendersphere independent of of the other -isms, overlapping with both feminism and MRA, and critical of both. Arguably the phrase “feminist criticism” is obnoxiously gendered (see below), because feminist critics are also critics of antifeminism, however given the hegemonic position of feminism within the gendersphere I think it is justified. The word “criticism” should be taken in its constructive sense, there are many aspects of feminism that feminist critics will agree with. Feminist Critics accept the tools of feminism (gender analysis, etc.,) and apply them to feminism itself.

Typical: I use this word as a term of art, meaning behaviour, etc., which (a) is common among feminists (or some other group), (b) is unlikely to be challenged by other feminists, (c) if someone with otherwise good feminist credentials does challenge it, they are likely to have their status as feminists challenged by other feminists, and (d) those without feminist credentials who challenge it are likely to be regarded as antifeminists/MRAs (or the equivalent opposition group). Typical behaviours within a group are likely to be perceived by outsiders as representative of it.

The ‘Bird in your Garden’ Test: A test for typicality. If all you need do to see a particular kind of bird is look out the window, that’s an indication that those birds are typical of where you live. If you have to travel 200 miles to visit a nature reserve to see them, then they’re not typical. Similarly if you can easily find an example of a particular argument or behaviour passing unchallenged among the usual suspects within the blogosphere, then that’s an indication that it is typical. If you can’t, then it probably isn’t.

Obnoxious Gendering: Refers to the typical feminist practice of equating maleness and masculinity with bad, and femaleness (though not femininity) with good. At its most obnoxious, it refers to the practice of never letting men forget just how lousy they are: “It’s male violence, committed by men, who are male. Just in case you didn’t get that, it’s men who are doing this, etc., etc., ad nauseum“. Obnoxious Gendering has a more subtle aspect in the use of gendered terms like “feminism” and “patriarchy” to refer to things which (in the view of the feminist) are good and bad respectively.

Self-flagellation Obnoxious Gendering applied to oneself. Typical behaviour of pro-feminist men. (Thanks to Hugh for the phrase.)

The Avuncular Arm: A typical pro-feminist response to male victimisation. An avuncular arm slides around the survivor’s shoulder, and he is invited to “consider how we oppress women”. A collective form of self-flagellation, this is victim-blaming at its worst because it casts the survivor into the role of perp. It is one of the reasons why feminism is toxic to many male survivors.

The Odious Comparison: Typical feminist practice of unjustifiably or inappropriately comparing male oppression, suffering, etc., unfavourably with female suffering. If a feminist or pro-feminist wishes to discuss male oppression etc., within feminism, then it is de rigueur to genuflect to the Odious Comparison.

Selective Focus: Typical feminist practice of looking only at those oppressions which (according to the feminist) affect women worse, in order to justify the Odious Comparison. For example, in a discussion about violence, only sexual and domestic violence will be considered. (Note that I do not object to a focus upon these issues. It is the exclusive and frequently innappropriate focus which is problematic.)

Rape Trivialisation: Typical feminist practice of defining rape so broadly that it encompasses the trivial, in some cases even sexual activity considered fully consensual by the person purportedly raped. (Note that this is not to be confused the the antifeminist objection to Koss’s rape study, that many of the raped women did not define their experience as “rape”, but whose experiences were nevertheless rape according to a non-trivialised definition.)

Rape Privilege: The practice of elevating rape and other sexual assaults “the worst”. A particular instance of the Odious Comparison. (This is a typical mainstream discourse. Feminists typically selectively focus on rape, but they do not typically privilege it in this way, in my experience.)

Denial, Dismissal, Minimisation, and ignoring of male oppression, suffering, etc.: I really need a catchy phrase to describe this quadrumvirate of discourses. (The ‘four discourses’?) Note that this is not limited to feminism, but is characteristic of the mainstream. Hence it is an example of feminism embracing and extending a previously existing gendered discourse.

Subordination: The typical feminist practice of presenting men’s oppression and suffering as subordinate to women’s. A fifth discourse related to the previous four.

The Three Techniques, also Displacement, Incidentalisation, and Exclusion: Mainstream rhetorical techniques used to minimise male victimisation, described by Dr. Jones in his paper “Effacing the Male“.

Lachrymosity: The tendency within both feminism and mainstream media to use tearjerkingly emotive language to describe female suffering and comparatively perfunctory language to describe male suffering. Arguably a fourth technique on a par with the three described by Dr. Jones.

Instanciation Not to be confused with “incidentalisation, which would be a better word for it, which is already taken. By “instanciation” I mean to portray instances of male victimisation as incidents rather than as systems of oppression.

Hidden Victimisation also The Other Side of the Mountain, and, in extreme cases, Holocaust Denial: How male victims and male oppression are rendered invisible by these techniques and discourses.

Comments and criticisms welcome, in particular, better terms for some of these phenomena would be greatly appreciated. Clearly many of the terms fall short of the “memorable one or two-word phrase” criterion. Is there anything I should add? Any good “Bird in your Garden” examples of each type of typical behaviour?

Crossposted between Creative Destruction and Darain Man.

I just ran into an interesting essay by bell hooks entitled “Understanding Patriarchy”. hooks argues that patriarchy is damaging to men in ways that not only men themselves, but also feminists fail to recognize. hooks’ analysis makes some important points, but is also limited by some of her assumptions about what “patriarchy” is and about how men experience victimization in such societies.
Read the rest of this entry »

(Originally posted at Creative Destruction.)

Both here, and at Alas, Barry has been responding to criticism of his “Male Privilege Checklist“. Most of these criticisms have been directed at particular items on the checklist, which regardless of the merit of the substantive objection, opens his critics to the countercharge of not seeing the wood for the trees. The most cogent objections, in my opinion, apply to the list as a whole and seem to have been missed by these recent critics.
Read the rest of this entry »

(Originally posted at Creative Destruction. I still haven’t got around to writing part 2.)

In preparing my response to Jeff’s comment to my recent post on Women and the Draft, I seem to have wondered rather far from the topic.
Read the rest of this entry »

(Originally posted at Creative Destruction.)

Me (in the context of the war in Iraq):

[F]eminists typically do view the harm solely in terms of its impact upon women, while denying, minimising, and ignoring the harm to men.

I should also have said “dismissing“. I should clarify that by “feminism”, I mean mainstream feminism, as exemplified by the bloggers and typical commenters at Alas. I also mean radical feminism, as exemplified by the bloggers and typical commenters at the Margins. I do not mean to include such individuals as Christine Hof-Sommers, Wendy McElroy, and Cathy Young. I think that’s a fair exclusion, because mainsteam feminism itself appears to reject these people, and their ilk.
Read the rest of this entry »

(Originally posted at Creative Destruction. Here slightly edited.)

Look at this headline on Boston.com

Men in Iraqi police grab kidnap scores in raid

Notice how the perpetrators are gendered, but the victims are not. In fact there’s no mention of the victims’ sex anywhere on the first page. It’s not until you get to the second that you find out what happened:

The gunmen speedily weeded out the men from the women. The women were taken to a room and locked up, witnesses said. The men were pushed into the trucks and driven away. The kidnapped included employees and visitors to the agency, janitors, and PhDs, even a deputy general director of the agency. Some were blindfolded and tossed into the backs of pickup trucks, said witnesses.

Read the rest of this entry »

(Originally posted at Creative Destruction. Here slightly edited.)

In the headline of his Sunday Herald story, Neil Mackay characterised the atrocity as follows:

Haditha: the worst US atrocity since Vietnam … Iraqi women and children massacred by American marines.

After giving a little background, including a comparison with the My Lai massacre during the Viet Nam war, (”mainly women, children, and the elderly”), he gives the following summary of the events in Haditha:

Minutes after Terrazas died, the remaining 13-strong unit of marines went on a bloody rampage, wiping out whole families, killing women, children and an elderly man in a wheelchair, and hurling grenades into homes. In all, 24 Iraqi civilians were murdered by American troops.

Let’s parse the entire story, to see how many of these women and children were actually men.
Read the rest of this entry »

“Shake on it?”

I couldn’t believe it. Danny was offering me a truce. Maybe he would leave me alone for the rest of the day. I took his hand and shook. And then—smack!—I was on the ground. Danny and John were laughing and high-fiving each other. While I was shaking Danny’s hand, John had run up from behind and tripped me. They had planned it.

When I was younger, I had a bunch of friends, and we played at each others’ houses. One of them had been Danny. Once grade school started, it all changed. I turned out to be relatively unathletic, and I was too good at school for my own good. Nobody wanted to play board games with me, even if I offered to let them win. I became interested in solitary, intellectual pursuits. Then the constant bullying and teasing started.
Read the rest of this entry »

Warning: Spoilers.

I don’t have television, so I don’t get to see films except when visiting others, or on the rare occasion I visit the cinema. This Christmas I went home to my parents, and was able to watch some of the films that were part of the seasonal offering.

“The Remains of the Day”, (IMDB, Wikipedia), a 1993 film based upon the 1989 Booker Prize winning novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, depicts the life of an emotionally repressed Butler, Mr. Stevens (Anthony Hopkins), who worked for an English Lord in the run-up to the Second World War. The story is told in flashback, in parallel with a journey he took 20 years later to visit the former housekeeper, Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), in the hope of persuading her to return to service in the house.
Read the rest of this entry »

(Visitors from Wikipedia are welcome to browse this now largely inactive blog. Active discussions on the subject of love-shyness and related matters continue on our new blog - Feminist Critics. — Daran)

Now that I have properly introduced myself, I am going to talk a bit about who I am and what I am going to blog about.

Let’s start with the superficial stuff. I am a 21 year-old college student in California, USA. I study psychology. I read lots of books, mostly on gender politics. I am white. I have to warn people so they don’t blind themselves looking at me on sunny days. I like to believe that I am vain. I often wear pink. Contrary to popular belief, pink can often be an expression of masculinity, but that is a subject for later. I don’t wear pink to look particularly masculine or feminine; I just think it goes well with black and grey.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ironically one of them was for male-on-male rape porn. Also the first bulk spam - 26 in one go. Previously I was getting 1-2 per day. It’s downhill all the way from here.

BTW, I anyone sees any spam in an otherwise inactive thread, please bump it to make sure that we see it. I want to keep this place as spam-free as possible.