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.

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

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.)

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?

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.

One of the best discussions of the concept of oppression I have seen is by feminist sociologist of gender Caroline New, who argues that “both women and men are oppressed, but not symmetrically.” New agrees with me that the view that men can be oppressed is rare: “sociologists of gender hardly ever discuss the possibility that men are oppressed on the same dimension as women, i.e. in respect of gender relations.”

What makes New’s essay so different from other feminist discussion of oppression, even ones that admit the existence of male suffering is that:

(a) New constructs a clear and concise definition of “oppression” and applies it evenly, instead of employing the kinds of double standards I discussed in Part 1.
(b) New acknowledges psychological suffering of men, but doesn’t reduce male suffering to just subjective experience; she recognizes material disadvantages men face, and the cultural attitude of male disposability.
(c) New recognizes the systematic and institutional character of the mistreatment of men, and recognizes that this mistreatment should be called “oppression.”

Conceptualization of “oppression”

How does New conceptualize “oppression?”

A group X is oppressed if, in certain respects, its members are systematically mistreated in comparison to non-Xs in a given social context, and if this mistreatment is justified or excused in terms of some alleged or real characteristic of the group.

I like this formulation a lot. It’s clear, it’s concise, and it’s fair. What happens when we apply this criterion to the situations of men and women in society? New concludes that we will find both men and women to be oppressed. New writes:

I shall argue that both women and men are oppressed, but not symmetrically. While men are positioned to act as systematic agents of the oppression of women, women are not in such a relation to men. Yet unsurprisingly, given the inescapably relational character of gender, the two oppressions are complementary in their functioning—the practices of each contribute to the reproduction of the other. In particular, the very practices which construct men’s capacity to oppress women and interest in doing so, work by systematically harming men.

I agree with New that men and women are not oppressed “symmetrically.” I also like the inclusiveness of this framing: it encompasses the views of feminists who believe that both women and men are oppressed (but that women are just more oppressed), and also the views of critics of feminism who believe that the oppression of men and women is incomparable because those oppression are qualitatively different. As a feminist, New’s view is unsurprisingly the former: she believes that women “benefit less” than men from the current system, and that men are “in general tremendously advantaged.” Yet one can disagree with her version of the odious comparison, and still accept the rest of her excellent analysis.

Another important point the she makes is that the oppressions of men and women are “complementary” and mutually reinforcing. This is a subject I will return to in future posts.

No double standards

What is special about New’s analysis is that she evenly applies her criterion for oppression to both women and men, without a double standard (emphases mine):

While feminists have stressed the material dimensions of women’s oppression, they have also seen ‘femininities’ as misrepresentations constricting women’s development and limiting their options, and therefore as oppressive. By the same token, masculinities may be oppressive.

It is hurtful to reduce women to their reproductive organs, or to interact with them while ignoring their subjectivity–girls’ development, women’s capacity to flourish, are arguably damaged by such practices (Miller 1978). Similarly, to treat males as ‘hands’ or ‘guns’ (or even ‘officers’), as disposable bodies, or as naturally violent, is a form of mistreatment likely to damage their development and relationships.

Not all in men’s heads

New avoids the error that many feminists make of reducing male disadvantages in society to psychological suffering. As I discussed in Part 1, both bell hooks and Marilyn Frye focus on men being dehumanized or damaged as a product of being made into oppressors, as if this was the only harm that came to men. Daran discusses another example of the same mentality in this post.

In contrast, New argues that:

The oppression of men is not only disciplinary or psychological. It also involves material effects of men’s positioning which we only fail to see as oppressive because of the lack of an obvious agent or beneficiary.

We may argue about the constriction of the self, but death and injury clearly constitute harm. Their imposition is therefore mistreatment, although seen as a normal risk for men in war (and even in civil life deaths of women and children in accidents are considered more shocking than those of men).

She acknowledges that men suffer death and injury that the current gender order is implicated in, rather than denying, dismissing, minimizing, or ignoring it. She also insists that the mistreatment of men should be seen “as genuinely oppressive to men rather than as the minor costs of privilege.”

Not just individual harm or suffering

New recognizes how the mistreatment of men is systematic and institutionalized in Western societies. In the quote above, she notes the cultural attitude that males are more disposable than females. Of masculinities, she says:

when institutionalised such misrepresentations constitute a form of oppression. Further, masculinities are used to justify material practices which injure men, and to deny or pathologise the resulting injuries (such as ‘shellshock’).

New lists war, objectification in the sphere of work, military draft and conscription, objectification and double standards for punishment in the criminal justice system, and mental health as areas where men experience systematic mistreatment (she acknowledges that these examples are hardly complete, and that some don’t apply exclusively to men).

Calling a spade a spade

Despite viewing men as more advantaged than women in the current gender system, New articulates a clear and fair definition of “oppression.” She also acknowledges certain empirical data, like men experiencing death and injury en masse, and biases towards viewing men as more disposable than women, that other feminist analyses tend to obscure or deny. Interestingly, when New’s definition is combined with recognizing the full range of the systematic mistreatment of men, she concludes that men are oppressed. I think this is no coincidence, and that other feminists fail to come to this conclusion because they conceptualize “oppression” in self-serving manner, or they take a self-serving view of what counts as oppression. I find New’s notion of oppression to be coherent, and if you see me using the term, I am using it the way she conceptualizes it.

In Part 3 of this series, I will begin to discuss some of the many counter-arguments to the idea of the oppression of men.

P.S. Caroline New’s essay is called Oppressed and Oppressors? The Systematic Mistreatment of Men, from 2001 in Sociology Vol.35, No.3, pp.729–748. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

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.

Feminism is responsible for propagating the notion that women are oppressed, and that men are not oppressed (or are the “oppressors” of women). I’ve always wondered what criteria feminists used to determine that women were oppressed and that men were not, even to a lesser degree.

What has bothered me about many feminists’ discussion of oppression is that they never define the term, or do so in an incredibly jargon-filled and ambiguous manner. They aren’t sure exactly what oppression is, but they know that it’s what men do to women!

Yet when feminists can’t state their criteria for oppression simply and clearly, and when they take it for granted that women are oppressed and men are not, then I become suspicious that they are being self-serving.

Other feminists, like Marilyn Frye, do clearly describe what they mean by “oppression,” but still deny that men can be oppressed:

The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction.

Only someone full of ideological conviction or empty of empathy could believe that this description characterizes women’s experiences, but never men’s.

In feminist discourse about oppression, there is a double standard. Some feminists can’t really define oppression, which makes me think that they define it self-servingly, in which case the double standard is built into their definition and it become tautological that men cannot be oppressed. When feminists can define oppression, and it sounds like their definition should indicate that men can be oppressed, they nevertheless argue that men are not. These feminists may have a reasonable standard for oppression; they just refuse to apply it fairly.

Yet some crazy brave feminists do argue that men can be oppressed. We will move on to them in Part 2…

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 want to begin by stating my agreements with hooks. She writes, “like many visionary radical feminists I challenged the misguided notion, put forward by women who were simply fed up with male exploitation and oppression, that men were ‘the enemy.’ ” hooks continues:

I stressed that feminist advocates collude in the pain of men wounded by patriarchy when they falsely represent men as always and only powerful, as always and only gaining privileges from their blind obedi­ence to patriarchy. I emphasized that patriarchal ideology brainwashes men to believe that their domination of women is beneficial when it is not:

For a feminist to admit that other feminists take an unjustifiably adversarial stance towards men, and to challenge that stance in print, is a pleasant surprise. It’s even more unusual that hooks challenges feminists for exacerbating the suffering of men. Furthermore, she questions feminist overestimation of the benefits of patriarchy to men and the portrayal of men as patriarchal automatons. hooks is on a roll here. But soon we run into trouble:

Separatist ideology encourages women to ignore the negative impact of sexism on male personhood. It stresses polarization between the sexes. According to Joy justice, separatists believe that there are “two basic perspectives” on the issue of naming the victims of sexism: “There is the perspective that men oppress women. And there is the perspective that people are people, and we are all hurt by rigid sex roles.” . . . Both perspectives accurately describe our predica­ment. Men do oppress women. People are hurt by rigid sexist role patterns, These two realities coexist. Male oppression of women cannot be excused by the recognition that there are ways men are hurt by rigid sexist roles. Feminist activists should acknowledge that hurt, and work to change it—it exists. It does not erase or lessen male responsibility for supporting and perpetu­ating their power under patriarchy to exploit and oppress women in a manner far more grievous than the serious psychological stress and emo­tional pain caused by male conformity to rigid sexist role patterns.

hooks is correct that male oppression of women (which does exist) is not justified by the fact that males also suffer oppression. hooks also makes a startling assertion: that feminists should acknowledge the damage of gender roles to men, and work to change it. In short, hooks is arguing the feminists should not focus exclusively on the needs and interests of women. She also criticizes feminist separatism. This is awesome. Most feminists aren’t separatists, but it is rare that they are outspoken in criticizing separatism.

hooks is clearly thinking outside of the box of feminist ideology. Yet she keeps one one foot stuck in the box when she makes the standard feminist comparison between the suffering of men and the suffering of women and claims that women’s suffering is greater.

In Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men, Nathanson and Young call this kind of attitude “comparative suffering,” the notion that the suffering of human beings can and should be quantified and measured against each other. My co-blogger Daran has noticed this attitude also, and he calls it the “odious comparison.”

Maybe women do suffer “more,” according to some (but what?) metric of comparison. Yet hooks has no business claiming this, as she does when she argues that men under patriarchy “exploit and oppress women in a manner far more grievous than the serious psychological stress and emotional pain caused by male conformity to rigid sexist role patterns.” Maybe hooks is right, maybe she is wrong. But how the hell does she know that female suffering is “far more grievous?” As a woman, hooks has never experienced male suffering, so she is really just conjecturing here. I have no problem with conjecturing; I think it is great, as long one recognizes that it is a conjecture, which hooks does not appear to do.

Does it make sense for hooks to even conjecture that women suffer more? Maybe, as long as this claim is stated more precisely. Does it mean that all women suffer “far more” from exploitation and oppression than all men suffer from psychological pain from gender roles? Or does it simply mean that women suffer more on average? If so, what is the overlap between the “distributions” of suffering? When talking about most gender differences, mainstream feminists like Michael Kimmel tell us that because of overlapping distributions, the similarities between the genders are more interesting that the differences. Not so, apparently, when the gender difference is in suffering.

Since gender roles are implicated in the death of men, it’s difficult to argue that the suffering men can experience due to gender roles is always more grievous than the oppression women suffer. (Unless the suffering of women is considered worse than the death of men.) For example, British teenager Joe Burns hung himself after being unable to lose his virginity. Arguably, the prescription of masculinity that men should lose their virginity motivated his suicide.

Perhaps men hurting themselves because of their gender roles is less common than many forms of female victimization, even though they can have similar maximum severity. Yet this formulation is not the argument hooks was making. hooks’ analysis does not reflect the existence of severe, if uncommon, forms of male self-victimization like suicide.

hooks depicts the damage to men under patriarchy as primarily psychological damage, caused by their dominance and repression of their own humanity (hook’s views may be more complex that this, but I am simply responding to what she writes in this essay). This is a good start in understanding male suffering, and many feminists don’t even get this far. But it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough.

Not only are men hurt by their own adherence to gender norms, they are also hurt by the gendered behavior of other men (which includes anything from bullying to sex-selective massacres of men). Furthermore, men also suffer oppression from women, though I believe that this type of oppression is less common. Finally, both men and women suffer oppression that doesn’t have an obvious agent, but is rather the consequence of social structures and institutions. More on why I consider men to be “oppressed” (if women are), and what “oppression” means in future posts.

Ultimately, hooks challenges some of the ideological excess of feminism, while staying mired in others. What is striking about her essay is that it does display real empathy for men; hooks doesn’t just pay lip service to male suffering to deflect criticism from feminism. Yet her adherence to certain feminist precepts makes her analysis incapable of accurately conceptualizing the sources and nature of men’s suffering. One of these is the conceptualization of “patriarchy,” which I will also discuss in future posts.

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.

In his introduction to the list, Barry begins by explaining the concept of privilege:

In 1990, Wellesley College professor Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. McIntosh observes that whites in the U.S. are “taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” To illustrate these invisible systems, McIntosh wrote a list of 26 invisible privileges whites benefit from.

As McIntosh points out, men also tend to be unaware of their own privileges as men. In the spirit of McIntosh’s essay, I thought I’d compile a list similar to McIntosh’s, focusing on the invisible privileges benefiting men.

He then goes on to respond to some earlier criticisms:

More commonly, of course, critics (usually, but not exclusively, male) have pointed out men have disadvantages too – being drafted into the army, being expected to suppress emotions, and so on. These are indeed bad things – but I never claimed that life for men is all ice cream sundaes…

Pointing out that men are privileged in no way denies that bad things happen to men. Being privileged does not mean men are given everything in life for free; being privileged does not mean that men do not work hard, do not suffer. In many cases – from a boy being bullied in school, to a soldier dying in war – the sexist society that maintains male privilege also does great harm to individual boys and men.

As an initial matter, it’s unfortunate that Barry resorts to an ad hom. The fact that most critics of the checklist are male has no bearing on the validity of their objections. In any case, the ad hom argument is no less applicable in the opposite direction: most proponents of the concept of male privilege are female.

A more serious objection is that Barry is committing the very sin that he complains of in others. He is seeing male disadvantage “only in individual acts of meanness” Indeed he uses that very word in his characterisation of the death of soldiers in war. There is, of course, nothing individual about it. They die en mass.

In fact what we have here is a perfect example of “invisible systems conferring dominance”. The “almost infinite variety of children’s media [which] featur[es] positive, active, non-stereotyped (sic: I don’t agree) heroes” (item 17 on the list) also feature male cannon-fodder being slaughtered in vast numbers, without the slightest show of concern from any other character. The news media routinely marginalises “unworthy” male victims in contrast to “worthy” female victims (See Dr. Adam Jones’s scholarly analysis: Effacing the male for more detail.). We are, in short, socialised – men and women alike – to regard men as disposable and dispensable, and their deaths as being of small account. This leads directly to men’s willingness to enlist, and society’s tolerance of conscription when voluntary enlistment is insufficient to meet the plutarchy’s needs. It is also certainly part of the reason the high rates of male suicide, workplace accidents causing death or serious injury to men, the greater willingness of the state to execute men than women, and so on, and of society’s general indifference to these facts.

And this “benefits” women in exactly the same way the most of the items on Barry’s list “benefit” men. They’re immune to conscription, and they’re not particularly targetted for “voluntary” enlistment. They do less dangerous jobs, aren’t driven to suicide as much, and can expect no worse than life imprisonment for even the most horrendous crime.

It is, in short, privilege as feminists define it – female privilege*.

But Barry doesn’t frame it in this way. Instead he says “men have disadvantages too”: a quite different framing of the issue.

“Men have disadvantages too” and it’s ugly twin “Patriarchy hurts men too” serve a number of useful ends for feminists. Superficially they acknowledge male suffering and disadvantage, and so serve to deflect one possible criticism of feminism. The word “too” positions male disadvantage as adjoint to and subordinate to female disadvantage, thus trivialising it. Finally, these alternative framings allow feminists to avoid ever admitting to the existence of female privilege. This is important, because the existance of female privilege would present a powerful challenge to the very idea of male privilege.

(“Patriarchy hurts men too” has one further function: By identifying victimiser and victim, it blames the victim, thus giving the feminist further reason to dismiss it.)

It’s important to realise that any relative advantage that group A has in comparison to group B could be framed either as a privilege (for group A) or a disadvantage (for group B). In practice gender is the only criterion used by feminists to decide on the framing. You will never see a feminist admit to female privilege, nor will they say that women suffer too. This is pure sexism.

45. I have the privilege of being unaware of my male privilege.

For feminists to complain about this, while refusing to acknowledge female privilege is nothing less than rank hypocrisy.

(*There are principled objections to the concept of privilege, which are unavailing to feminists because they apply to both male and female privilege. But this is beyond the scope of this blog post.)

Updated (27 September) to add this list of links to the entire ‘Privilege’ series of posts, which I shall keep updated from now on:

“Privilege” and “Disadvantage” as sexist framing devices
Do white men really benefit from privilege?
More on Privilege
]]> http://cddaran.wordpress.com/2006/12/30/privilege-and-disadvantage-as-sexist-framing-devices/feed/ 1 Daran http://cddaran.wordpress.com/2006/12/30/evidence-of-male-dispensability-part-1-the-news-media/ http://cddaran.wordpress.com/2006/12/30/evidence-of-male-dispensability-part-1-the-news-media/#comments Sat, 30 Dec 2006 11:11:18 +0000 Daran http://cddaran.wordpress.com/2006/12/30/evidence-of-male-dispensability-part-1-the-news-media/ ]]> (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.

Jeff:

I was pointing out the relationships between the general oppression of women (i.e. they’re not allowed to participate in some jobs, don’t make as much money as men do, etc.) to the fact that they aren’t required to register with SS. You can deny a connection, but there is one–if women were thought of as equals of men, you can be pretty sure that the SS would require them to register as well. Instead, they are generaly thought of as not able to handle combat situations (which, of course, they are handling in Iraq and Afghanistan as we speak), or being as valuable for some jobs, etc. If this weren’t the case, they would likely be required to register with the SS. Thus the connection.

I agree with Robert’s analysis. Women are excluded from SS not because they are regarded as incapable, but because we live in a culture which regards men, but not women as expendable. It simply doesn’t matter to us if men are slaughtered en mass. We care about women; we don’t care about men. Gender-selective conscription is one manifestation of this cultural “value”, but we can also see it in the attitude of the news media, of humanitarian organisations, in the sanctioning of discrimination in national and international law, and of course, in feminist discourse. I’ll deal with these other issues in another post. In this one I look at the media.

Consider the following news report (cited by Dr. Adam Jones):

The Death March of the Kosovo Refugees
MORINA, Albania, April 18 (AFP) — Among the thousands of refugees fleeing Kosovo, none suffer worse than those forced to travel for days and nights on end on foot. While many cross the border into Albania and Macedonia in cars or open trailers drawn by tractors, the rest have had to walk, harried by Serbian troops on what for some became a death march. Staggering up to the red barrier marking the frontier, carrying children and baggage, and supporting the elderly, they sob as they gulp down food offered by humanitarian organisations. Their accounts, consistent, precise and detailed, describe a Kosovo that has been turned into a hell, criss-crossed day and night by columns of refugees expelled from the Serbian province in ferocious “ethnic cleansing.” “We walked almost without stopping for four days and four nights,” groaned Hysnije Abazi, 22, from Kladernica in central Kosovo. “We were escorted all the time by Serbs in vehicles or on foot. We were not allowed to drink, stop, rest or shelter from the rain. Before we set off they set fire to our cars and tractors and ordered us to march in columns.” They also took away all the males aged 15 or over [!]. Crinkle-haired Afertita Kajtazi, 23, her eyes ringed with fatigue, said their [i.e., the refugees'] treatment was deliberately harsh.

Dr. Jones’s emphasis. What was happening to those young men is they were being massacred, but the point I’m trying to make here is not the treatment by the Serbs, but by the media. As Dr. Jones notes this ‘”genocidal cull of ethnic-Albanian males”(7) takes place in the blink of an eye, amidst a torrent of frankly lachrymose descriptions of the convoys of helpless “worthies.”‘

Compare and contrast the above with this report about a massacre of women in East Timor (due again to Dr. Jones)

Michael Valpy,
“Rape and Murder in Sight of Our Lady”
The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 November 1999
(originally in The Globe and Mail, 1 November 1999)

THE heart of darkness in East Timor is the Catholic Church compound in this coastal market town – so still and empty, a silent statement on the evil that was done here.

What took place on the day and night of September 6 is not known in detail to Australian Army investigators. The number of victims and their identities are uncertain. What is known is that most were women and girls.

The evidence attests to that: the jumble of bras, underpants and sanitary napkins on the steps leading up to the church; the children’s leg bones; a hank of a woman’s hair; the scorched skeletal remains of two women behind the church; the thick bloodstain on a schoolroom door, covered by bougainvillea petals baking beneath the sun.

Certainly what happened was male savagery as old as history – rape, killing, burning, razing – in a church, a school, in the adjacent huge, grey, concrete shell of a cathedral called Ave Maria under construction to the glory of God. Savagery against the defenceless, as women and children usually are; vengeance on a people who voted for independence from their Indonesian military overlords and landowners.

[etc., etc., etc.]

The story of what happened in the compound is incomplete. The investigators have not found many witnesses. Most of the Suai region’s population, between 10,000 and 14,000, is still missing. Women and children were carted away on trucks to Indonesia’s neighbouring West Timor province, about 30 kilometres away, where they are still being held. The whereabouts of many of the men is not known.

This is what the Australians have pieced together. The evil began a few days after the August 30 independence referendum. Indonesians owned many of the coffee and agricultural plantations around Suai. The town was a stronghold of the pro-Indonesia militias, most of whom were from West Timor. Some of the militiamen, mainly local officials, had been recruited in town.

After the vote result became known, soldiers and militia gangs began rounding up people from the outlying villages, bringing them to Suai’s district military headquarters.

Father Hilario Madeira, pastor of the church of Nossa Senhora de Fatima (Our Lady of Fatima), went to the headquarters and got permission for the people to move to the church compound.

Several thousand, mostly women, set up a shanty town there. Many of the men, prime targets of the militias, had already fled to the hills, Lieutenant Mayne said. The women were thought to be safe once they got inside the compound. Safe from murder, he emphasised. No-one was safe from rape.

At dawn on September 6, militia and some soldiers took up positions along the front wall of the compound, across the street from the market in the centre of town. They began firing at the crowd inside. There was panic. Most people ran helter-skelter from the compound. Some didn’t. Some went into the partially built cathedral to hide. About 200 ran to the church. It is believed that children were in the classrooms of the adjacent school.

[etc., etc., etc.,]

The first emphasis is Dr. Jones’s. The second is mine.

This massacre of women was unquestionably an appalling crime, but set against the backdrop of even greater attrocities being perpetrated against men which, again “take place in the blink of an eye”.

These are hardly exceptional pieces. The marginalisation of male victimisation is a standard trope in the news media. It cannot be explained by a cultural attitude the see women as “less capable” than men; clearly the men are no more capable of defending themselves from slaughter than the women. The value that is reflected here is the low value our culture places on male lives. I strongly urge you to read Dr. Jones’s papers in full.

Edited for typos, spelling and markup.

Edited to trim the Herald article. If you wish, you can read it in all its tear-jerking detail here.

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.

curiousgyrl:

I dont think that is a fair characterization. A fairly old development in feminist thinking/theory is the notion of ‘gender’ as a relationship between humans–both ‘men’ and ‘women.’ The change over last decade from university Women’s Studies Departments to departmetns of Gender and Sexuality was largely made to make exactly the point that feminism is about the negative impact of gender opression on society as a whole.

I assume that the feminism I see on the web, and the feminism I have encountered in Real Life in the tiny corner of the world which I inhabit, are typical of feminism as it is practised elsewhere in the western World. I hesitate to comment on Gender Studies Departments, since I have never attended one, but it is not immediately clear to me that “gender studies” necessarily equals “feminism”. Nor is it clear to me that they differ in practice. It does not follow that the rebadging of “women’s studies” as “gender studies” has been accompanied by a meaningful expansion of the topic area, or a shift in the analytical norms. An example of such a rebadging can be found in Mary Anne Warren’s 1985 book Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection:

By analogy, gendercide would be the deliberate extermination of persons of a particular sex (or gender). Other terms, such as “gynocide” and “femicide,” have been used to refer to the wrongful killing of girls and women. But “gendercide” is a sex-neutral term, in that the victims may be either male or female. There is a need for such a sex-neutral term, since sexually discriminatory killing is just as wrong when the victims happen to be male. The term also calls attention to the fact that gender roles have often had lethal consequences, and that these are in important respects analogous to the lethal consequences of racial, religious, and class prejudice.

As Dr. Adam Jones, founder of Gendercide Watch observes:

Warren explores the deliberate extermination of women through analysis of such subjects as female infanticide, maternal mortality, witch-hunts in early modern Europe, and other atrocities and abuses against women. [...] The difficulty with Warren’s framing of gendercide, though — and this is true for the feminist analysis of gender-selective human-rights abuses as a whole — is that the inclusive definition is not matched by an inclusive analysis of the mass killing of non-combatant men.

Had Warren stuck to “femicide” or a similar formulation, then her treatise might have been guilty of no more than ignoring similar atrocities committed against men. By using inclusive terminology, the implication is that she is covering the entire spectrum of sex-selective killing. Therefore the absence of sex-selective killing of men from her analysis implies that such killings do not exist, or are insignificant.

In other words, she did not merely ignore sex-selective killings of men. By implication, she denied them which, as a perusal of just a few of Gendercide Watch’s case studies will show, is tantamount to holocaust denial.

Here’s an example of a feminist minimising the harm to men:

However, there’s strong evidence that for girls and women in particular (but not exclusively), things have gotten much worse since we invaded [Iraq]

My italics. To Amp’s credit, he doesn’t completely ignore the effect on men and boys – unlike many feminists, he gives them a parenthetical nod. But the implication of the italices portion is clear – It’s less bad for males.

A priori, that statement may or may not be true. In the complete absence of any analysis whatsoever of just how much worse things had gotten for males, I couldn’t see how such a statement could be justified, so I asked him. His reply:

Daran, provide me with some evidence that non-combatant men have been killed more than non-combatant women. Provide me with an example of an important Iraqi political/religious leaders saying that if Iraqi men are under virtual house arrest, that’s a good thing. Provide me with evidence that Iraqi men are being raped or sold into sexual slavery at anywhere near the rate that Iraqi women are.

Notice how he shifted the burden of proof onto me. Nevertheless, I responded here, and here.

curiousgyrl:

I know that BPHMT is often derided, but that doesnt mean that most of us think that it isn’t true.

BPHMT at it’s most derisory is a rhetorical device used by feminists to dismiss male victimisation. But even when it’s treated seriously, it is a minimising discourse, which I critique here.

Its just not ALWAYS the most relevant point.

The problem with feminism is that it’s not EVER the most relevant point. Here are a couple of questions I put to Barry:

Can [Barry] identify more than a handful [of mainstream feminists] who have blogged honestly about the catastrophic gender-selective targeting of men for slaughter in Iraq and elsewhere? Can he identify any?

Barry’s honest answer was “no and no”. And to his credit, he has addressed the issue in subsequent posts, though he has never lead on the subject. I’ll put the same two questions to curiousgyrl: Can she identify more than a handful of mainstream feminists who have blogged honestly about the catastrophic sex-selective targetting of men for slaughter in Iraq and elsewhere? Can she identify any, other than Barry’s recent posts? I have a few more questions. How is it that Barry, who is unquestionably well-read on the subject of the Iraq war, could have been unaware of the catastrophic sex-selective targetting of men for slaughter? Is curiousgyrl aware of it? If not, why not? If so, how did she become aware of it? Not through feminism, or a “gender studies” class, I’ll bet.

The problem with feminism is that it concludes that women are more oppressed than men, but in making that judgement, it looks at female oppression through a microscope, and male oppression through a telescope. Backwards. Pointing at the ground. With the lens covers still on. And both eyes closed.

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.

There’s some small comfort to be drawn from the fact that – unusually for this kind of atrocity – many of the men were released alive. Some of them were tortured. Many others are still missing, probably among the dozens of bodies floating down the Tigris, with electric-drill holes in their skulls. What’s not unusual for this kind of atrocity is its gender-selectiveness. Almost all of the bodies being washed up in Iraq are male.

But you wouldn’t know that from the media. A day later, and the victims had been completely desexed.

These reports exemplify incidentalisation and displacement which, together with exclusion are the three strategies commonly used in the media to marginalise and conceal the gender-selective victimisation of men.

Feminists make the opposite complaint. According to them it’s violence against women, which is marginalised and concealed in the Media. For example, Echidne of the Snakes complains about the media coverage of the Amish School Shooting.

And only a few days earlier another murderer selected smaller teenaged girls for his violence in another school. Yet this is something the radio news last night didn’t mention when discussing “school violence”. Indeed, the Air America news avoided a single mention of the victims’ gender.

That last sentence in particular caught my eye. What Echidne has just described in the vocabulary of the three strategies is displacement, and I have yet to see an example of it applied to female victims. Echidne’s remark motivated to me several weeks ago to examine the first hundred returns from Google News on the atrocity. Apart from some very early “news just in” bulletins when the victims’ gender wasn’t known, every single one of the reports identified them as female. Nor did I find any examples of incidentalisation (nor exclusion, but the nature of the crime made that strategy impossible). Echidne’s observation, while notable, seems to have been an isolated case.

And you need to read far down into the newspaper stories before you come across a one-sentence-aside about the hatred for girls these horrible acts clearly demonstrate.

Why this silence, this looking-aside? Why make loud comments about possible motives but not look at the obvious one: that these men hated girls? Is it because on some level the society accepts such a hatred, because if we start focusing on it we have to ask some mighty unpleasant questions?

I could ask the same questions of her. Why the silence about the gender-selective slaughter of males in Iraq, which she’s certainly aware of? Why haven’t any of the major feminist blogs as far as I can see done a post about the this kidnapping atrocity? If men had been locked in a room while scores or hundreds of women were kidnapped and tortured, the femisphere would have erupted.

The answer, of course is that gender-selective atrocities perpetrated against men don’t fit the feminist narrative. Girls being killed because they’re girls is evidence, in feminist eyes, of widespread societal misogyny. Women being spared because they’re women is because… err… Let’s talk about something else.

More about the mass kidnapping can be found here.

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.

In the first house attacked, according to MacKay there was a girl called Eman, her “father… mother, grandfather, grandmother, two brothers, two aunts and two uncles”, of whom one aunt and a niece escape – a total of 12 people in the house to start with. We’re told that Eman and one brother survived, Presumably the escaping Aunt was the “Only one of the adults in the house that day [who] survived.” Also the niece, giving a total of four survivors. We’re told that seven family members died, leaving one unaccounted for, which must have been a child, probably the other brother.

Here’s the tally for house number 1:

Dead:

2 Men. (Grandfather, Father)
2 Women (Grandmother, Mother)
2 Male probable Adults (Uncles)
1 Female probable Adult (Aunt)

Injured:

2 or 3 Children (Eman, Brother, maybe other Brother)

Uninjured:

1 Woman (aunt)
2 or 1 Children (Niece, maybe other Brother)

The second house contained eight individuals, of whom seven died:

1 Man (Father)
1 Woman (Mother)
1 Female probable Adult (Mother’s Sister)
5 Children

Not killed:

1 Child

House number 3:

Killed:

4 Men

Uninjured

1 Woman (intentionally spared by the Marines.)

Taxi:

Killed:

5 Adults (almost certainly all Male)

Total Killed:

7 Men
2 Male probable Adults
5 Adults probably Male
3 Women
2 Female probable adults
5 children.

Of the 24 people killed in this massacre of “women and children”, it looks like at least seven, and probably as many as forteen were men, perhaps five were women, and five were children. Morever it appears that what started out as an indisriminate slaughter, perhaps, had morphed by the time it reached the third house into a targetted cull of men.

But you really have to dig deep into the story to tease this information out. Would a normally attentive reader who read to the end have realised just how deceptive the headline and summary paragraph were? What about someone who only read as far as the summary paragraph? Or who only read the headline?

In actual fact the gender gap is even more striking. This list of the victims confirms many of the details given in the story. It also confirms some of the assumptions I made in my analysis: The uncles and aunts were indeed adults. The taxi passengers were indeed male. However, there are a couple of discrepancies. Firstly the other brother in the first house, who was indeed a child and who I assumed survived, in fact died. One fewer adult died than MacKay accounts for. Either there was an error in his list, or a second adult escaped. My lack of familiarity with Arab naming conventions means I cannot tell for certain, but my impression is that it was one fewer woman. (Perhaps the “two aunts” were each the mother of the other’s niece, leading Mackay to double-count the mother. However this is speculation.) I assumed the mother’s sister in the second house was an adult who died, but no such person is listed as a casualty. Instead, there is an additional child. The revised tally of the dead is as follows:

14 or 13 Men
3 or 4 Women
7 Children (5 girls, 2 boys)

Three Strategies

There are many ways you could describe this atrocity. It was a massacre of men, and maybe of children, in which a small number of women got caught up. But a massacre of women it was not. How then, does MacKay manage to pass this event off as a massacre of “women and children”? He doesn’t give false information; the factual claims match the United for Peace list almost exactly. Rather it is the placement, and selective concealment of facts which create this impression. The specific errors and omissions which lead me to infer perhaps two more women casualties than there were, were surely unintentional, but the pattern of exclusion, displacement, and incidentalisation which served to marginalise the male victims was not.

Of the three techniques documented by Dr. Jones, exclusion is most obviously at work here. Men were excluded entirely from the headline. The taxi occupants were excluded from the summary paragraph. The phrase “women, children and an elderly man in a wheelchair” appearing as it does superficially to be a characterisation of the victims, not just some of them, serves to exclude the men.

displacement also rears its head in this paragraph. Having highlighted the “worthy” victims – the women, the children, and the disabled old man (therefore “worthy” according to the distorted cultural values at issue), the “unworthy” remainder (who would they be?) are displaced and effectively concealed behind two gender-neutral terms. “Whole families” might suggest that some men were killed, but not necessarily. The phrase is unlikely to be read as asserting that every single member of each of the families was killed, and indeed there were survivors from each of the three families attacked. Likewise the claim that “In all, 24 Iraqi civilians were murdered” does nothing to suggest that any of them were men. Later on in the story, the male occupants of the taxi were displaced into “driver” and “students”.

Finally we see incidentalisation. Dr. Jones explains the process:

Modern news, as noted, is a hierarchical creature. It generally “leads” with the dominant theme of the article, which the headline is also meant to convey. Many newspapers, printing or reprinting an article or wire-service report, will include only (a version of) the headline and the first several paragraphs of the story. Thus, to relegate an important theme to passing mention in the middle reaches of the article, or to introduce it only at the end, is effectively to render it incidental and inconspicuous, if not outright invisible.

MacKay’s treatment of the murdered men is anything but “passing”. Indeed, he is to be commended for merely doing his job his extensive coverage in the middle and latter parts of the article, but one fact, utterly crucial to our understanding of what happened in Haditha is given the scantest attention: the sparing of the woman in the third house. The women and children had never been the targets. It had always been the men the marines were after. Notice how one woman had been able to escape from the first house, even though burdened with a child, while an unencumbered man hadn’t. Nor did they finish off the injured children in both houses. What happened at the third house is that they had stopped disregarding the women and children. Their rage had subsided, just enough for the code of ‘civilian’ immunity to reassert itself, but only for the “default” civilians.

Feminists tell me that the goal of feminism is not merely to advance the aspirations of women, but to challenge sexist systems which disadvantage men too. The systematic marginalisation and concealment – effacing – of male victims of war surely meets that definition. When will feminists challenge 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.

The worst was on the playground, during sports and games. In the early grades, tripping was called “pizza delivery.” Playing soccer meant spending half the game on the ground from Danny, John, and Tyler tripping me. The teacher put a stop to it eventually—after a couple weeks. Another favorite playground pastime was wrestling, which the teacher didn’t really succeed in discouraging until probably 7th grade. I was one of the smallest kids in the class, so the bigger boys would always push me down or trip me. I was never punched or seriously injured, but I often came home with bruises.

I realize in retrospect that not all of the teasing was malicious, but a lot of it was, and I had trouble telling the difference. That is because I couldn’t understand the motive to tease someone or pick on them. I tend to be very gullible and trusting by default. That’s why I shook Danny’s hand. Yet it was Danny and John that the girls chased around the playground.

I got teased for being small, having freckles, being a know-it-all, and my English accent. My parents are English, though I have lived my whole life in California, so I had a slight accent when I was younger. “You’re English, Hugh… want some tea and crumpets?” was a constant refrain, in the snooty accent that many Americans think is English. Fucking tea and crumpets. Seriously, why are Americans so obsessed with English people liking them? I actually like crumpets, but I am not a big fan of tea.

What made the bullying and teasing worse was the structure of the school. It was a very small school, so there was only one class in each grade. Mine was about 14-18 students throughout the grades. We had the same teacher from 1st-8th grade. This setup meant that I was with the same group of people virtually all day, every day. If people were being nasty to me, I couldn’t get away from them. I could go off alone, and sometimes I did, but then I was lonely.

Around 3rd or 4th grade, I started to withdraw from other people. I had always been serious and somewhat quiet, but I started becoming shy. I never felt good feelings around people, and instead felt anxious and off-balance. Instead of socializing, I delved deeper into my solitary interests. I became more unique, more intellectual than others, and consequently more different. They couldn’t relate to me, and I couldn’t relate to them. I didn’t have any friends over to play more than a few times for the rest of grade school.

By 6th grade, Danny left. I still don’t know what was up with that kid and why he was so violent. He would walk up to you and fake-punch at you. He had way too much testosterone or something. By 7th and 8th grade, the physical bullying had mainly stopped. During a couple grades, the were other boys in the class that were smaller than me, and they took some of the heat off me. But the damage was done. I had no social skills. People excluded me, or I excluded myself. I had a stutter, which was exacerbated by people interrupting my soft voice. I couldn’t make eye contact with people. My face was frozen into a mask, so I could never properly smile for school photos.

The plus side was that I got very good at my interests (music and art) and I started making money drawing portraits in 8th grade. Some of my classmates admired me for these abilities, especially the girls. However, admiration on its own did not create friendship, and may have been a barrier to it. At least the admiration did help me save some vestiges of self-esteem.

Anyway, this is how I grew up with no real friends and no social support. The story is somewhat depressing for now, and will go on that way for a little while, but it does get better. It’s relatively easy for me to talk about (at least this part of it), because I have mainly gotten over it.

You may have noticed that this post is titled Ch 1. I’ve decided that posts that are mostly about my personal experience will be organized into chapters that will be in more-or-less chronological order. Then I can write more conceptual posts in between, that will talk more about ideas and some of the conclusions I have drawn from my experiences.

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.

It is in this later timeframe that the film opens, with an aerial view of Darlington Hall, a large stately home set in rolling English Countryside. Miss Kenton, in voiceover, reads out a letter to Mr. Stevens, in which she gives her reaction to the news of the sale of the house to Mr. Lewis (Christopher Reeve), a retired Congressman, after the death of Lord Darlington (James Fox). These two individuals represent the old and new world orders respectively. Kenton also talks about herself. Her marriage has failed and she is nostalgic for the good old days when she worked at the house.

Inside, Mr. Lewis has taken up residence, but things are only just being put back into order in preparation for the arrival of Mrs. Lewis (who is never shown). Stevens reminds his new master about a leave of absence he had previously requested. Lewis readily agrees, and even offers Stevens the use of a car. As Stevens walks through the house, he sees various members of staff going about their business. But each fades away like a ghost, revealing that they are but memories of former times. The house is now largely empty. Stevens takes the car, and begins his journey to visit Miss Kenton.

The film flashes back to when Kenton first joins the staff as housekeeper. Their lives are depicted in a series of vignettes, each of which reveals a little about the characters’ personalities and the developing relationship between them, which takes place against the backdrop of the meetings between the Great and the Good, and the mighty Affairs of State decided under the eves of Darlington Hall in the run up to the War. Stevens’ defining characteristics are his emotional repression, his perfectionist devotion to his work, and his loyalty to his master. Despite the day-to-day domestic crises he must manage so as render them invisible to his Lordship and esteemed guests, he is always calm, always efficient, always busy, but never hurried, never rude. The only emotions he displays are his understated irritation at Miss Kenton over the early conflicts between them, and later, when relations between them had warmed, he smiles, just as understatedly, at her playful suggestion that he finds one of the serving girls attractive, though it is ambiguous whether it was a smile of embarrassment because the suggestion was true, or, as he claims, one of amusement at her “nonsense”. He shows no emotion at all when deliberately humiliated by one of Darlington’s guests, and when his father dies, he carries on serving, remarking only that it was “what [his father] would have wanted”. Even when Miss Kenton is sobbing in response to his emotional coldness, the only response he is able to muster is to refer to a domestic task which needs her attention.

Kenton is equally efficient at her work, but altogether warmer and less repressed, as strong-willed as Stevens, but more independent-minded. She is initially upset at his insistence that she not refer to his elderly father by his Christian name, even though this is the correct protocol for her because of the father’s lower position of the staff. Later she confronts Stevens who is in denial about his father’s increasing forgetfulness. She prevails in a disagreement with him over a prospective employee, and when, at Lord Darlington’s command, two German-Jewish servant girls are to be dismissed, she is outraged, pointing out that the likely consequence is that they would be sent back to Germany, and threatens to resign in protest, (a threat she later admits to being too cowardly to carry out). She does not accept Stevens’ response that his Lordship knows best. As their relationship warms, it becomes clear that she has fallen in love with him, and maybe he with her, though this is ambiguous, as his reserve would not permit him to show it. Nor does the rigid protocol between them properly permit her to express her love toward him. Despite all, she mounts a determined but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to get under his skin. Finally she strikes up a relationship with another man, whom she eventually decides to marry and she leaves the house on the eve of the Second World War.

Lord Darlington is a Nazi sympathiser, who uses his influence to broker the political arrangements we now call “appeasement”. But it is not clear to what extent he supports the Nazi’s true agenda, or how much he is deceived by them. He irritates the then Congressman Lewis, one of the dignitaries at a conference, and who argues in favour of the Realpolitik of professionals, rather than that of “honourable amateurs”. Darlington is quite regretful about dismissing the two Jewish servant girls, but considers their continued employment inappropriate. Later he expresses his remorse at this, and asks what happened to them. Miss Kenton replies that she tried to place them at another house, but was unsuccessful and does not know what became of them.

In the ‘present’ of the film, depicted in parallel, but set twenty years after in the late fifties, it is revealed that Darlington died a broken man, his reputation destroyed after his role in the appeasement had been exposed in the papers. When the subject comes up in conversation with various people he meets during his journey, Stevens admits to being the butler at Darlington Hall, but initially denies having served or even met Darlington. It is clear now that he recognises his former master’s failings, and several times he indicates that he has regrets about his own life, as does Miss Kenton (now Mrs. Benn) when they finally meet. Kenton declines his offer to return to Darlington Hall, announcing instead that she wanted to stay with her husband and to be near her pregnant daughter. At the end of his visit Stevens departs for Darlington hall in a clichéd downpour of rain. Kenton cries, while Stevens, still unable to show any emotion or feeling toward her, simply raises his hat.

One of the striking things about this story is that there are no villains. Darlington is depicted as basically honourable, more patsy than true fascist. Even the German dignitaries, all minor characters, are never depicted doing anything villainous. The tragedy for the two major characters is a consequence, not of the villainy of others, but of the circumstances in which they find themselves, and their own imperfections, in particular their inability, even in their later years, to depart from the script prepared for them, to make better use of what remains of the day.

* * * * * *

No film review by me would be complete without gender-analysis. Given the period and the nature of the story, there was little opportunity for the film-makers to challenge gender-stereotypes. None of the characters departed from their class- and gender-ordained roles. There was only one major female character, and although several other female characters were named, I never noted them talking about anything other than a man. As previously mentioned, Mrs Lewis does not appear in the film at all, and the character’s only purpose seems to be to make Mr. Lewis respectably married.

Another complex of gender tropes that interests me, though I have not yet formalised it as a “measure” is the depiction of violence toward and death and injury of male and female characters. No violence at all was depicted in the film. Overall there were three character deaths, all male, one injured male, and two females missing, possibly dead. Stevens’ elderly father tripped and fell, though he was not seriously hurt. Later he died of a stroke. The dramatic purpose of these events was to elaborate Stevens’ personality and his relationship with miss Kenton. Toward the end of the film, it was revealed that Darlington’s godson (Hugh Grant) – a supporting character during the pre-war narrative – had died in the war. This was to illustrate the personal impact of the failure of Darlington’s politics. Finally Darlington himself died of a heart attack, allowing Lewis to take over Darlington hall, representing the replacement of the old order by the new. None of these deaths were shown on screen. The other characters did not respond casually or dismissively to them (a stereotypical treatment of male death). Nor does the author’s/scriptwriter’s choice of the victims’ gender seem to be based on a gender stereotype. Rather all three seem to be dictated by non-stereotypical considerations.

The same cannot be said for the two Jewish girls who were dismissed on Darlington’s orders. Kenton was unable to place them at another house, and did not know what became of them. The implication is that it is likely that they were returned to Germany thence to become Holocaust victims. The dramatic purpose of this was to show the human consequences of Darlington’s politics, and how Stevens, Kenton, and Darlington himself reacted to them. The house employed servants of both sexes, so there is no reason why they had to be two girls, rather than a girl and a boy, or two boys, other than the gender norm that we care more about what happens to girls than to boys.

* * * * * *

In summary: an excellent film which had the misfortune to be up against Schindler’s List in the 1994 Oscars, and had to make do with eight nominations only. If you get the opportunity, go watch it. Watch Schindler’s List too.

Crossposted between Creative Destruction and DaRain Man. Also posted, with modifications to Wikipedia.

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.