rightbedone

Primal, Masculine, Child Rearing

2011-09-22T03:18:00.001-07:00

Dads throughout the nation feel a threat to their masculinity. According to a recent study, testosterone rates lower as men spend more time with kids.

The finding itself was not surprising. It has long been known that women have hormonal reactions to becoming caregivers. The only reason to think that men did not have similar reactions would be if our species were reptilian, and males did not participate in child rearing. Yet, reactions in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Fox News were histrionic fear that dads were losing their manliness. Are men still real men after they’ve had children and their testosterones levels have dropped by (*gasp*) more than 30%?

Being a man is not about having a high testosterone level. The only reason that species have men and women is to have children. It’s about sexual reproduction. It is not threatening your masculinity to have children because it is the ENTIRE POINT OF maleness in the first place.

The American vision of masculinity leaves no room for children. As a very funny Washington Post blog joked, “You don’t want to hold a baby unless you’re holding it like a football.” Yet somehow, our culture of masculinizers has got it in their heads that being a father is less manly than being a football player.

The reason that football is considered masculine, and fathering is not, is simple. For hundreds of years, western society has convinced men to be cannon fodder. This is especially true in America. Young boys don’t play with dolls, a tool that might teach them how to be better fathers. They play with GI Joes, a tool that teaches them how to be guerrilla warriors. While girls are learning how to prepare food, something that comes in handy for any person who likes to eat, boys are outside learning how to throw a basketball into a basketball hoop, a task that comes in handy for almost nobody.

But we grow up, and when we do, we are supposed to realize that GI Joes and basketball were just play things and that family and work are our lives. I feel true sorrow for any man who doesn’t.

Men don’t realize what being a man actually means for numerous reasons, but the biggest one is fear. Some of them are cowards, but most simply don’t understand what they are afraid of, so let me explain it for them. The entire threat behind traditional masculinity, the threat that is literally beaten into us as children by other boys who are afraid that they are not masculine enough, is the threat of feminization.

From the start, children are told that boys wear blue and girls wear pink, and they believe it because they can’t tell (through clothing) what else could possibly be the difference between a boy and a girl at an age when physiological differences are practically inexistent. Under the coaching of terrified and cowardly men, boys make other assumptions about what it means to be a boy, and when a boy does not conform, he is punished. Boys are mocked, ostracized and sometimes physically beaten. A boy who goes to a ballet class may be teased because “only girls do ballet.” A boy who wears nail polish may not be allowed to play with his friends because, “this is a boys-only club.” A boy who kisses another boy in his teenage years may be beaten to death in the Wyoming plains.

Even if we are not the subject of these punishments, we learn from them. We see what happens to boys who wear nail polish. We see what happens to Matthew Shepard. We equate that in our minds with being a girl because that is exactly what our punishers intend. What other message could we get out of the statement, “this is a boys-only club,” but that we will be ostracized for not being “boy” enough, and in a society that recognizes only the two classic genders, who else could we be if not a boy, but a girl? Girls, therefore, are teased, ostracized, and beaten. For some strange reason, boys don't like being beaten.

But the threats are hallow. The people who defend traditional masculinity are cowards. Do not be afraid. You are not less of a man for caring for your children. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you are not an actualized man until you are caring for children, so go out right now and adopt some. If you don’t want to adopt, offer to baby sit. If you don’t know anyone who needs a baby sitter, then email me and I will recommend a terrific mentoring organization in your city or town. We have many jobs as adults in a democratic society, but as a man we only have one; raise the next generation.

Living the Thug Life as a White Stay-At-Home Dad

2011-08-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

Americans have an ignominious relationship with thugs. In the 2008 election, Tom Tancredo’s campaign was focused on the threat posed by MS-13 (he even started rumors that the gang was joining the military to shoot our boys in the back in Iraq in a desperate attempt to make the threat relevant). Going back to the 1970’s, Nixon’s war on drugs was really a war on thugs in the form of people of color who used the wrong kind of drugs. As evidence of that, the drug war has never targeted “civilized” drugs the same way that it targeted crack, meth, and other “thug” drugs. Powder cocaine was sentenced far lower than crack cocaine until recently, and misuse of prescription drugs is still hardly even a blip on the DOJ radar. Yet, this image was cultivated from a website that is admiring of Pres. Nixon, confusing the issue even further. We throw the word at police, security guards, Obama is called the thug-in-chief by tea party members who are called thugs by Moveon.org, and black youth and Muslims are our go-to thugs. Anyone we find prepared to apply violence indiscriminately is a thug.

And just who is willing and able to apply violence without thinking. Sometimes black men, sometimes, white men, sometimes Arab men, sometimes Latino men, but always men. So what is the female equivalent of the word thug? What do we call a woman who is willing to commit violence indiscriminately? Do we even have a word for it?

The word you're looking for is not bitch. A bitch is a woman acting outside of her appropriate feminine role. Rather, thug is equivalent to slut, which is a woman acting within the appropriate feminine role but taking it too far in a dangerous and indiscriminate way.

A thug is someone who has learned his social lesson too well. From an early age, boys are trained that the ability to commit violence is a primary source of our power. We spend a lifetime training boys to kill, hurt, and maim. We indoctrinate them into violent sports, video games, and even glorifying the word “thug” in proper contexts. We show them thousands of scenes of violence on television, almost all of them perpetrated by men. As boys are coming to terms with what it means to be a boy and later a man in America, they are bombarded by images of men killing other people (often women). Occasionally, a woman joins in the violent blood romp, but only if she is sexy enough to make the man feel secure in his masculinity while she’s doing it. We are trained to be warriors, to protect our family, society, and country from thugs.

To twist the Apostle Paul's words in Romans 8:30, if warriors be for us, who be against us? When the cops are warriors, the criminals are thugs, and when the marchers in Selma are warriors, the cops are thugs. When the Marines are warriors, the terrorists are thugs, and when the men from the village are freedom fighters, the imperialists are thugs. The image on the right are not Taliban thugs as you may have assumed, but Afghan freedom fighters with the Northern Alliance fighting the Soviets in a different era. Somewhere in the middle are we who want free from this Madonna/Whore complex.

But while the the whore side of the complex may be able to be reclaimed (as the Slut Walks attempt), there is no reason to reclaim thug. Sluts have fun. Sluts enjoy creating life. Sure they take risks and break hearts, but they do not kill. Thugs, however, are irredeemable. Thugs murder, rape, steal, and beat. Talking about the risks involved in acting like a thug is ridiculous because being a thug is pure risk. If a thug doesn’t kill, he dies at the hands of a true thug in mixed martial arts, in the streets, or in Afghanistan.

So we must stop rewarding warriors, and stop reclaiming thug. We must push back against violence and try to learn from women's work how satisfying it can be to nurture and care for those we love. We must break out of the warrior/thug complex.

Video Game Violence, Censorship, and Sexism

2011-07-02T08:25:00.001-07:00

Arguing against banning video game violence but arguing for a ban on animated child pornography is sexism.

The reasons that we censor pornography have always been motivated at least partially by sexism. There is no other way to explain it. How is it that consensual sex is so horrific that some consider breastfeeding in public as obscene, but partaking in a simulation of the quartering of a woman dressed in highly sexualized clothing is not? How could it possibly be that the act of creating life is obscene, while the act of ending life is not?

The obvious answer is that our narratives have convinced us that women hold the power in consensual sex, but clearly it is men who hold the power over violence.

J. Scalia points out in his recent opinion on age-limits for the purchase of violent video games that literature is full of violence from Homer on down to today's copy of the New York Times. Isn't it also full of sex? Wasn't Lott fucked by his daughters (Genesis 19:30-36), and didn't the men of Greece rape the Trojan Women at the end of the Illiad? And yet, interactive depictions of these acts are sold in XXX shops to people 18 and over.

J. Scalia also argues that pointing out how much video game violence is racist and antisemetic (as J. Alito does) makes a case that it is art and therefore free speech. But an inordinate amount of child pornography is sexist. Does that mean that child pornography is art?

In an earlier case that banned animated child pornography, despite the fact that they cited no studies indicating that animated child pornography harms children, they were willing to believe that it would feed pedophile's urges and make them more likely to victimize children. However, they are unwilling to look at the ample studies that prove categorically that violent video games increase violent behavior, decrease helpful behavior, and have led to countless assaults.

I'm not saying that I think we should regulate video games, but if we do not, we must not regulate animated child pornography either. But of course that will never happen because sex is so insurmountably abhorrent that even consensual loving sex is often an exception to the first amendment. On the other hand, violence is necessary to keeping women in their place.

Violence is necessary because we need to train little boys, and I mean tiny little boys who have no reason to hate anything, to grow up into killing machines. We need to convince men that killing one another is a feat that not only is acceptable, but is rewarded on Memorial Day, Veterans Day, the Fourth of July and by saying, "Thank you for your service" when we encounter a professional killer on the street. I do not mean to trivialize the service of our men and women in uniform. They are professional killers, but if we are to live in an imperfect world we have to be able to protect our nation. However, we must keep their service in context.

These violent video games are aimed at boys because we need to train them to believe that it is exciting to kill and be killed. In video games, it is easy to say I "shot him" and he is "dead," and even I am "dead" or I am out of "lives." It is all so trivial, fun, rewarding, and exciting that the military itself uses these video games for training and recruiting purposes, and sponsors the creation of these video games. We are training boys to live lives of violence. Violence requires victims. Many of these boys are not able to find legitimate victims so they turn to one another, or their wives, or their children, or people in the street, or themselves.

And the reward is even better than it seems at first. The reward for all this violence is the continuation of the gender hierarchy that puts men on top, keeps women on their backs (and I do mean it that way), and aligns the world all right (and I do mean it that way). If the little girls flinch when the little boys cheer, it just proves to us all that little girls and the women they grow into are not cut out to do what needs to be done to run our country, our world, or our society. Girls need to be protected, so they should play Dora the Explorer, or at worst Super Mario Bros., but leave the violence to the little boys who are "just naturally drawn" to beating prostitutes to death before decapitating another victim.

The worst problem with this holding is that it completely misidentifies and aids the true threat to our freedom of speech. We are no longer living in a world where governments (Egypt, China, and Iran) are able to control what we say. We now live in a world where the most active censors are corporations, the same corporations that are making these video games. Sometimes corporate censorship is the kind that we know traditionally, as is the case with Apple and Amazon.com when they ban objects from their platforms because they claim they are obscene (who gets to say what's obscene and how come it's always gay smut?).

More often, corporate censorship is the marketing of certain (usually sexist) products, while making other products mostly unavailable. They say that they market what the public wants, but if that were the case nobody would ever pay for marketing (I'll let you puzzle that one out). In fact, they spend millions attempting to get us to want certain products. Corporations use advanced psychological techniques that are as effective as brain washing, and they target children whose brains do not fully mature until as late as 25-years-old.

Which is what these corporations do with violent video games in California. They rate the game M for Mature, and recommend it for users over 16, but then market to 12-year-olds who buy the games by walking to their local Game Stop and then hiding it until late at night during a sleepover (where your child visits and plays it even though he doesn't own those kind of video games because he is a good kid). The question in this case was not whether the video game manufacturers should be able to sell to kids, or even market their mature products to kids who everyone admits are too young for the game. The question in this case is should those kids have to ask their parents for permission to buy those video games as they have to do already for pornography. The question is whether our puritanical society thinks consensual sex is worse than murder. The answer is clear. They are both terrible evils... [Excuse this interruption, I'm being handed a message from our sponsors. "Violence is awesome!!! Rip off some fucking heads!!! Rip them off!!! Yeah!!! Rip that hot bitch in half!!! Yeah!!! This rocks!!!"]

Slut Walks: Marching Against Shame

2011-06-08T17:15:00.000-07:00

“Slut Walk” started in Toronto when, as reported in the Washington Post, a stupid cop told a women’s forum at a college that, "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized." Some of those women decided that they wanted to dress like “sluts” and not be victimized anyway, so they took to the streets. Many of the women marched in little more than their underwear, some in their pajamas, and some

in sweatpants. So how do these marches impact men’s liberation? Here are my thoughts.

Male Helplessness

Part of what Slut Walk is saying is that men should control themselves. The implication is that men CAN control themselves. Too often people say that men are pigs, dogs, animals, beasts, some-other-automaton. When they say that men are pigs, people imply that men are unable to control their base urges to hurt people. Men sometimes think they sound feminist by saying it. They think that deriding themselves puts them in league with the anti-man feminists, but they are mistaken. The premise at the heart of most feminism is that men are better than they historically were. They can be great fathers, great homemakers, and great people.

That is what Slut Walk implies, and that is a powerful statement. Men are able to control themselves, and they should.

Hyper-Gender

At the same time that the marchers are telling men to control themselves, they are also saying that they should be able to wear, in the words of one blogger, clothes that make them “look and feel good”. But who says that they look good? A society that has been dominated by men for tens-of-thousands of years tells them that they feel attractive when they look sexually available. Pushing the feminist movement

further into femininity is no better than pushing the men’s liberation movement into the church and onto the football field.

Before we fight for our rights to feel good about ourselves, we should ask why those things make us feel good. All too often, what feels good is the exact same thing that makes us feel bad other times. Shame and sexual attractiveness are tied together by the fact that they are both different sides of the same coin of gender oppression. Each time we say that we feel good looking and acting feminine, we are making it easier to feel bad when we do not look

and act appropriately gendered.

For almost all women, it is painfully impossible to be appropriately feminine. The Slut Walkers should be thoughtful about dress or risk being thoughtless about sexism.

Shame

Rupert Murdoch’s, "The New York Post" could be trusted to respond to any such movement by using their own buxom blonde to cast shame on the marchers. Kirsten Powers’ editorial says that reclaiming the word “slut” is immature and misguided. But is that what the Slut Walks are really attempting to do? Some women may be attempting to reclaim the word, but the much more powerful claim is that the marchers are attempting to undermine shame. The word slut is only valuable as a tool of oppression so long as it is tied to shame. To paraphrase Bob Marley’s, “no woman, no cry;” no shame, no oppression.

And men are learning from these movements. They are starting to recognize the shame men feel for being too un-masculine is not something that is natural or fixed. It is trained into us since the moment that someone says, “it’s a boy,” and the training continues until the day we die. If women are successful at reclaiming the word “slut,” they prove that this kind of shame is only a society-wide gender-induced mass hallucination.

There is a good deal to be said for shaming rapists and wife beaters. They deserve to be shamed, and society should continue to do so. However, this movement will be less powerful if it focuses on that shame. If this movement can stay focused on liberation from shame, it can be an inclusive movement. There will always be people like me who will march alongside women attempting to shame men for aggressive sexual behavior, but the majority of men (and women) is not interested in finger pointing even when it is legitimate. I’m not saying to stop shaming wife-beaters, pedophiles, and rapists. They are the worst kind of hyper-genderized men, and should not feel anything but regret for what they have done. What I am saying is that the movement can continue to focus on finding the bad guys, or it can take this moment and focus on doing better, and thereby deny shame as a tool to the forces of sexism.

The Future of Gender (as I see it)

2011-05-04T02:49:00.000-07:00

Obviously, this can only be my opinion, otherwise it would be a news article or a book about my magic 8 ball, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about where gender is headed, and I wanted to go on record. I know it's a terrible idea when trying to predict the future, but if I remain vague enough, no one can prove me wrong. You see Fox News, I have been learning something from you after all.

Based on the last hundred or so postings, I have spotted two opposing trends. There is clearly some progress. I am always heartened at how substantial the movement is that I merely attempt to identify in this blog. But there is also some clear backfire. Ostriches don't really hide their heads in the sand when they are frightened, but they do run, and the radical regresivists are high tailing it right now.

There is so much progress on the way towards equal and plastic gender that it is difficult to document it all, but three examples provide an outline.

Tolerance of Non-Traditional Genders: Main stream society now embraces, or merely rolls its eyes, at the idea of btqq and more than 40 other nontraditional genders, including hors gender categories like 3rd gender and intergendered. While I do not want to overstate how accepting society actually is, it is practically a revelation that some of these "good-ole-boys" don't form mobs and riot when we consider how threatening this must be.
On an old episode of Ally McBeal, a transgendered kid appeared with nary a comment. Instead, the entire office just referred to her as "him" except when she was not around, and then of course, she succumbed to the popular notion that all non-traditionally gendered people are inviting violence when she was beaten to death at the end of the episode. While the mainstream loves to believe that they are accepting, their legitimate concerns for the safety of the non-traditionally gendered is sometimes genuine, and sometimes (as may have been the case on Ally McBeal) it is a cautionary tale. When those concerns fall into the latter camp, they resonate of the wisdom of a father who tells his daughter after she is raped that she shouldn't have been wearing that "trampy" outfit.
Though this movement has a long way to climb, just the very fact that there is a rung on the ladder where gender is not tied to biological sex is titillating. Can you feel it? I'm practically shaking with titillation.
Ambivalence Towards Gays and Lesbians: As a society, we now appear to love our gay stylists and lesbian comedians as much as we love to hate them. I don't think it's possible to overestimate the impact of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" on my life. Though the show perpetuated gay stereotypes, it also began to value typically feminine concepts in straight men. The notion that it was hip and fun for straight men to care about their dress was a revelation brought to us by our love of gay men, so long as they stay in their proper spheres. The main stream acceptance of a t.v. show featuring five gay men as experts (a practical Stonewall Riot of fashion advice) allowed America to pat itself on the back and say, "Look how far we've come."
Still, we have grown to love certain kinds of gays, and that is surely progress. Hell, there's even the Log Cabin Republicans (a.k.a. the Banana Republicans) and when both parties are at least talking to gays and lesbians, there can be no doubt that progress is being made.
The Feminist Successes: And of course, in many ways feminism is becoming a victim of it's own incredible successes. Hillary Clinton not only made a viable run for president but sits as another in a line of women serving as Secretary of State. Women are in more and more professional positions, including occupying almost 60% of our nation's colleges and universities. And despite the cries of the Reganites, children are still being raised without devolution into utter chaos. Yes, without a doubt, the feminist movement of the sixties and seventies has been an overwhelming success.

But the direct result of the progress of these movements was a series of sometimes unconscious and sometimes blatant backfires of regressivist thinking. Though it makes society seem incoherent, these trends are just as mainstream as the three trends above and many people embody each and every contradiction without any sign that their heads are about to lose cabin pressure. Our society loves contradiction like a geometry teacher loves plaid and stripes.

New Manliness: I don't think that I am imagining it when I notice that many people expect men to revert back to 50's stereotypes. Men are expected to be warlike sports-adoring knights even as they are expected to be good dads (not fathers) and caring husbands. We are fine with women succeeding, just so long as it doesn't mean that men have to make any changes whatsoever. Cultural icons from all sides of the spectrum, from Sarah Palin and Judith Schafley, to Barack Obama and Sarah Jessica Parker, all continue to idealize men who practice traditional masculinity like it is a hobby. This movement is disturbing as much for its unrealistic expectations as its very real repercussions.
Men cannot look to Ward Cleaver as an example of what it takes to be a good dad because there would be no Ward without June who now has a satisfying and meaningful out-of-the-home job. So men came back to an empty house. People expect men to be comforted by that. "No kids at home?" we're supposed to say. "Great! I can pop in that first person shooter I've been dying to try while I drink beer and watch porn on my 64" 3-D television."
But it is sadder than that really. We just didn't think at all about what we expected men to be like in a society where women had been liberated because there was an inherently sexist tone at the base of the 1960's and 70's women's movement. Only a very few academics stopped to ask what men were missing out on. Men never asked themselves, "what are we missing when we leave girlie things to the women?" And the reason, of course, is that girlie things are inherently valueless except in so far as they can attain some socially recognized success. And by socially recognized, we mean recognized by men. So you see, in the end, there is no such thing as reverse sexism, it's just the same sexism, differently perceived. Kind of like the same M&M, but a different color shell.
Girl Power: We have certainly recognized that Girls (big G) have power. Isn't that what the Spice Girls were all about? Lipstick, makeup, and toenail polish are all now being reclaimed as powerful objects of ornamentation that can promote a woman's career just like a good power tie can make or break a president. Right?
If they were really acknowledged as powerful, then wouldn't the people in power be wearing them? Why isn't the president, or even the Secretary of State borrowing from this supposed "Girl Power?" How many women ceo's are wearing power FM Pumps while they walk into a boardroom?
The answer to all these questions lies in the name of the movement itself. It is "Girl Power," not "Woman Power." We make it infantile because our image of a powerful woman is not an older woman at the helm of a fleet of merchant ships. She is supposed to be a child taking her power in a way that men can recognize (sexually), rather than a threat to the established hierarchy. Unforunately, "Girl Power" is not in contradiction to "Boy Power" as it at first sounds, but actually opposes "Woman Power."
Another, more insidious version of "Girl Power" is the new long line of "Power Princesses." On top of targeting VERY young girls with an image that benefits the bottom line for traditional mega corporations, it exemplifies a vision of the powerful female as young and it shows their "power" as trivial and meaningless without men.
I am baffled by the fact that nobody has thought to make it a movement about queens instead of princesses, and I am not talking about the elbow candy queens of the last century of French autocratic rule. I am talking about Queen Elizabeth I, perhaps the most powerful and successful monarch in European history. She managed to take England from an inconsequential island nation looking up at the dutch with eyes the size of saucers, to being the famed empire on which the sun never set. But if English monarchs aren't your taste, we've got Cleopatra (the real one, not the sexy one from the pornographic imagination of the "Greatest Generation"), Hatshepsut (yes, that Pharaoh does have breasts), and Isabella I (the discovery of the American trade route? Just something she thought up during her knitting circle).
But of course, we know why we'd prefer to focus on Princesses. Because women with actual power scare us, even if they are VERY young. Worse than that, the reaction from the folks over at Disney to the criticisms of traditional princesses, has been to make the princes who were rescuing them powerless themselves. Make the man look powerless even while you make the woman actually powerless. The impact of this on children, boys in particular, but also girls who will eventually realize that the new Princess of Whales is just elbow candy to anti-democratic figureheads, is going to be interesting to watch as the current generation of kiddo's comes of age.
The New Gender Code: All of this has accompanied a feeling among Americans that putting children into their particular gender roles is completely okay. It is practically impossible nowadays to buy boys clothing with any pink on it at all. Even Teddy Roosevelt, the great Rough Rider himself and defender of early 20th Century masculinity, photographed his infant sons in dresses (that infant in Teddy's eldest daughters lap, is his son Quentin). This desperate scramble to make sure that every child, no matter how young, is easily identifiable as boy or girl is a brand new movement. Considering that we are supposed to be in an era when gender doesn't matter, this seems at first like a flat out contradiction. However, it is the belief that gender is an inconsequential game which we all play, that enables this hyper-genderization of our young children. After all, children are supposed to play, and one of the things that children need to play at is gender. That is how they learn what it means to be a boy, girl, man, woman, and other (see the section on non-traditional genders above).
But children are not playing at gender. Their parents are using their children as genderization test subjects. Infants don't buy their own camo fatigues and princess dresses. We do it for them, and when we do, we are sharing with them our priorities. We are explaining to them better than if we gave them a lecture on the immovability of gender traits that women are elbow candy, and men are warlike and aloof.
There are others still who feel free to hyper-gender children because they don't think that gender is influenced by environment. This theory is based on books like "As Nature Made Him." Not even taking into account the horrible scientific methodology on which these books rely, none of us actually believe that gender is immovable, otherwise, like Teddy Roosevelt, we wouldn't point at parents who dress their infant boys in dresses and say, "You're messing that kid up." It wouldn't matter how we dressed our infant boys because they would grow up to be manly men (or less manly men) regardless of what we taught them to be. All girls would like pink and all boys would hate being kissed, regardless of how recently pink was actually a color associated with masculinity and how often full grown men in other cultures kiss each other as a sign of comradery.

So here's my prediction. I predict that the generation we are now raising will rebel. We are at a stage right now that is more gendered than at any time since the 1950's and in some ways advertising has made us more gendered than at any time in America's history. But the genie is out of the bottle. As the young people in the preschools, and elementary schools today grow into adulthood and go to college, too many of them will read Gloria Steinem, Catherine MacKinnon, and Susan Faludi to keep this whole gender liberation thing a secret. That knowledge will spread and we will have a gender rebellion on our hands that is as significant as the hippies and bra burners (note; very few bras were actually burnt).

That is the extent of my rather whimpy prediction. This generation will rebel against its parents (now that's controversial), and it will be so incredibly creative and exciting that none of us are able to say for sure exactly how it will be done. Most of us will be terrified of it (because if we are not, it won't be rebellion), and all of us will think to ourselves in our grumpy ways, "kids today." Even those of us who want a rebellion against today's hyper-genderization will utter complaints like, "These kids don't know what a rebellion looks like. I remember back in the day..." The cycle will continue. The only thing you have to ask yourself is, will you be on the right side of history?

Parents: This is Your Wake Up Call

2011-04-20T09:59:00.000-07:00

In the latest issue of Parents Magazine, there was a long article about how to bridge the growing achievement gap between boys and girls. If you haven't been keeping up with the research, this time boys are being left behind at alarming rates.

Even a cursory view of the actual research shows us that boys and girls brain structures are virtually identical. How can this be? After all 58% of college graduates are now girls, and girls are outscoring boys on all standardize tests, except in math and science where the they are neck and neck. It seems to be the conclusion of much of popular culture that our educational system is letting boys fall behind by expecting them to sit down and learn. Parents Magazine seemed to assume that the wetware, the actual brain, is different in a boy than in a girl. But of course, if that were true, then no amount of tricks or strategies would be able to undo boys inherent inability to compete now that girls had been liberated.

How short does our memory have to be to have forgotten that boys used to outperform girls?

Boys weren't allowed to go around playing games all day because they were just naturally active. To the contrary. Through the course of human history, boys have been doing better than girls by simply going to school and sitting through hours upon hours of drab and dry Latin classes, and lectures on algebra. In 1950's America, teachers weren't allowing boys to get involved in their learning by being more active. In fact, boys were expected to sit quietly and listen to their teachers without having any breaks until recess. So how could it be that in today's school environment, where children are more engaged in physical movement while learning, and play to teach, and everything else, suddenly boys brains have become incapable of focusing for the relatively small portion of the class period that they are expected to sit still.

The right blames feminism for all this. They see a conspiracy; an attack on boys. But if there is an attack on boys, it is from the right. By rewarding boyishness in boys, we are doing terrible damage. Americans have told boys that what it means to be a boy is to play wildly and with abandon. Boys play sports and watch TV.

According to the actual science, boys and girls learning abilities and styles are nearly identical until puberty. Whenever a child focuses on one activity for an extended period of time, they are developing executive function and attention span. Executive function is the single biggest factor in academic success, not any magical brain chemistry that is gender specific. And executive function can be learned, just as throwing a baseball or counting to 100. Going to a ballet, playing house, playing tea party, and decorating your dolly's play area are all ways to exercise executive function. Playing sports, playing video games, and watching cartoons are not. In the traditional gender roles, girls have a lot of executive function practice, while boys have a lot less.

In a way, forcing kids to sit through those long boring classes in the 1950's actually was good pedagogy. We now know that they didn't learn what they were supposed to be learning, but they were learning something far more important. They were learning the ability to sit through a boring lecture, a board meeting, a long exam, or a grueling all nighter before a deadline. They were learning executive function.
Childrens clothes today are more gendered than ever. Girls shirts are more pink, and if they are not pink, they always have frills and poofy sleeves (trust me, I've looked). Boys shirts are mostly about sports, military, or (for some reason) dinosaurs. Parents today seem desperate to make sure their children are identified with their proper gender, and if parents are desperate to make that identification, than their children will sense that desperation and do what they can to make their parents happy.

It is time to break the cycle before another generation of boys is lost to gender expectations.

Boys already commit violent crimes in far higher rates, and they already die young because of risky behavior at rates so high that even befriending a boy in early pubescence increases a girls rate of dying from risky behavior also. I am anxious to see what this hypergendered generation of boys is going to do. Hopefully, they will follow in the footsteps of so many generations before them and they will rebel. But this time, they will rebel from the WASPy gender roles that are being foisted upon them by their parents who are so terrified of themselves that they have spent the last decade hiding behind makeup and football helmets instead of trying to liberate themselves.

I write this with my 14-month-old son on my chest. My son is wearing a red and orange striped shirt, a pair of brown sweat pants, and a small pony tail sticking off the top of his head. He is asleep right now, but he will wake up!

Mothering: My Day in Drag

2011-04-03T03:13:00.000-07:00

The difference between mothering and fathering tell a significant story. A couple of weeks ago, I dressed in a suit in order to make a contact about a possible job, and I experienced that difference first hand.

People looked differently at me when I was in my man drag. They avoided my gaze. Normally, when people see my 13-month-old, they smile, laugh or stick out their tongues at him. But that day, they were far less likely to look at him at all, much less play with him. On the rare occasion that someone did look him in the eye, they conspicuously looked away when I turned towards them. I was an entirely different person than the tee-shirt and jeans wearing mop headed, Dad. I was a Father.

Mothering
According to Sara Ruddick, the author of the 1989 book Maternal Thinking, "Anyone who commits her or himself to responding to children’s demands, and makes the work of response a considerable part of her or his life, is a mother." The most common definition of mothering emphasizes caring for someone, usually a child. Sometimes we say it derisively to indicate that someone cares so intensely that they have lost their boundaries.

Fathering
Fathering, on the other hand, is (as Webster's dictionary puts it) begetting. It is a place of origin, as in, "He is the father of the social welfare state" or, "He fathered that child." A father need only make a woman pregnant and then walk away. However, fathering has also come to mean earning money for the household, like a conveyor belt in a factory. The role of earning money fits well with our traditional view of a father as someone who is there at the beginning but doesn't see the parenting role through to completion. The father is there in the morning, all the parenting happens, and then the father comes home at night for a glass of beer and maybe some disciplining of the kids.

From Dad to Father
While I was on that subway wearing a suit, to the people around me I was a father. I was an originator, not an actively engaged participant in my son's life. I was not a dad who responds to the needs of someone I love, but just a father probably taking him to daycare. It was a sad experience for me. There was a presumed distance between me and my son. It felt like I wasn't getting credit for my "mothering."

But there was also a moment of realization of how far we have come. Whenever I am dressed as Dad, people do see me as a mother. They acknowledge Ms. Ruddick's statement that mothering is not female specific. They look me in the eye and talk to me about my child. When I go to playgroups and reading circles with my 13-month-old, I see other Dads who are met as equals by the mother's in the group. I am heartened to see that the traditionally female skill of child rearing, not just child begetting, is becoming a human skill shared by men and women alike. This barrier is falling as quickly as the workplace gender barrier was to fall in 1961. We men are taking what should rightfully be shared with all of us.

Parenting?
As described in earlier posts, the stay-at-home mom is a recent invention made available to more than a handful of extremely wealthy women only through the invention of technology. Before the early 20th cetnruty, most but the wealthiest women had to work even as they were raising their children, and the wealthiest women had servants that raised their children for them so it would be a teeny bit ridiculous to even call them stay-at-home moms.

The real question is not whether we should all do what Judith Schafley tells us to do and have the women stay home with the kids while the men go to the office, but that we should all be able to find a combination of "mothering" and "fathering" that suits our individual talents, skills, and desires. Perhaps for most people, we all want to mother and to father. We all want to find a meaningful job where we can challenge ourselves and engage with other adults, and we all want to cuddle with our kids once we get home.

Certainly, daycare can make that available to a larger swath of people, just as having one auncle stay home with all the cousins can free up the family to go to work. But part time work is another option, where parents can trade off between one another. In that world, perhaps a man in man-drag on a subway car with a stroller will be assumed to be as much a mother as a woman in sweat pants.

Recently, Sara Ruddick passed away, and we all lost a great mother who spent her life caring for us and trying to introduce us to the satisfaction of being great mothers ourselves. And perhaps, for those women who want to be fathers, they can find equal satisfaction in being great fathers. When it comes to parenting, Sara Ruddick showed the world that gender roles are artificially confining unless we can pick which parts of which gender role we'd like and which we wouldn't.

We won't be able to pick and choose our gender roles until we start valuing the woman's role as much as we value the man's role. As long as the emphasis on gender equality remains on the importance of giving women a place in the office, we will always be valuing traditionally male priorities. And it is not enough to smile and say, "Isn't that wonderful that he's a stay-at-home Dad," or "It sure is nice to have a man in the classroom." We need to actively advocate for men in pink collar jobs and the home, and while it is good to have women allies, the impetus needs to come from men.

One example of this kind of liberating gender traitorship is the active and full engagement of a man in man-drag in mothering. I felt deliberately defiant and a terrific rush of liberation when I sang songs with my kid the whole way home. For some, the melody of liberation is "We shall overcome," for others it is actually, "Twinkle twinkle little star."

Two Opposing Articles on Feminism Make the Same Mistake

2011-03-11T11:04:00.000-08:00

What is the commonality between militant isolationist feminism, and regressive pro-masculinity movements?

Fewer isolationist feminists exist now than in the 2nd wave, but I recently stumbled on an article by a woman in Mumbai that argues that men should just get out of feminism altogether. Men, she argues, are determined to conquer feminism and make it their own in the same way that they conquered India (and the Americas). She gives as an example the fact that men look like "good-samaritans" when they simply call themselves feminists, while women look "cantankerous."

In a total opposite corner of the world, a man in Boulder makes the same point that men should stay out of the feminist enterprise in a badly written rant on why we should be "strict" with our women. Oddly, the rant is posted on a wedding photographers website. That's right, some guy in Boulder believes that such a rant will get him business. And he's probably right. There are enough men out there whose cowardice has them quivering in the corner over feminism that he's probably making bank even in Boulder.

They are both saying essentially the same thing. They are both saying that men have no place in feminism. They are both saying it for the same reason. They are saying it because they fail to see what men have to gain from valuing traditional women's work and traditional women's roles.

They both think that men are getting together to talk about feminism and how to break free of traditional gender roles as a way of manipulating women. The radical isolationist thinks men are doing it in order to continue patriarchy (the title of her article is "Another Patriarchy: Feminist Men"). The radical regressive thinks that men are joining feminists because they are attempting to placate their wives and partners. But neither of them can think of any motive that could possibly be genuine.

Surprisingly, they both give tons of reasons that men might want to be free from masculinity. The feminist rants about the causes of "violence; Patriarchal stereotypes, male insecurity, male ego, male frustration, male fear over female sexuality." While the regressive points out that men work longer hours than women, and often do more dangerous jobs. These reasons that men may want to break free of masculinity's maniacal amoral mores slap both commentators in the face, but they willfully refuse to notice. Why?

The feminist is confounded that men would be able to solve anything by sitting around in a room and discussing "oppressive behavior." Instead of violently and vehemently resisting something, she is upset that men are taking credit for discussing how best to tackle the problem. One of the things that men have to learn from women is how to sit around in groups to discuss "oppressive behavior," as well as how to let go of "male insecurity, male ego" and see spending times with their families as more important than working long hours at dangerous jobs for a little more money. Believe it or not, and neither of these commentators do, in some ways feminine methods of approaching life are actually BETTER than masculine ways of approaching life. Sitting in a circle to talk about things is BETTER than violent and vehement reactions in some situations. Working less and earning less in order to spend more time with your family is BETTER than earning more and seeing your family less for most men and women.

But in a society where our values have been defined by traditional masculinity for so long, even radical feminists default to thinking that masculine values and systems are superior. Until we have a society wide wake-up call that shows regressive and progressive thinkers alike that we are all thinking way too masculine, equality will only be a pipe dream.

Radical Regressivists Attack the Stay-at-Home Mom

2011-02-27T15:28:00.000-08:00

In a book review of "The Flipside of Feminism," a regressivist author claims that the feminist push for universal childcare is an attempt to "simply transfer women’s dependence on men to dependence on Uncle Sam" and create more government interference in the lives of good hardworking Americans. The author of the article uses Superman and Lois Lane as an example, saying that the children of that duo would likely grow up maladjusted because they would be tragically neglected by their parents.

First of all, he's Superman. He can stay home with the kids if he wants. He was never as good a reporter as Lois Lane in the first place, and he doesn't even need a baby monitor because he has super hearing. Besides, the kid might be able to fly, depending on his genetic makeup, and then he could just join Superman on his crime fighting adventures, albeit in a supporting role.
But despite the ridiculousness of this bizarre and troublesomely wholesome example, the authors ignore the simple fact that most moms have been working moms since history began. It was only in the last century that the idea of a stay-at-home mom was able to enter the American ideal, and even that ideal was false. While some upper middle class American women were staying at home with the children in the 1950's, most women, especially women of color, still had to work even during the hey day of the stay-at-home mom myth.
Additionally, it was because of the social welfare state that the stay-at-home mom was even possible. Women in the tenement factories of the lower east side of New York stayed at home only because the deplorable conditions of their factories were in their own living rooms. They weren't spending their time raising well adjusted children because they were too busy sewing together shirts. If the factory wasn't in their home, they were traveling to the dangerous conditions of the Triangle Shirt Factory, or attempting to find milk that was unadulterated with bleach because there were no FDA regulations. The women on the prairie weren't taking care of the kids while they waited around for their husbands to come back in from the fields. They were growing vegetables, milking the cows, feeding the chickens, and doing the household repairs because how else were they to live before the price controls created in the New Deal. In the stockyards in Chicago, there was no minimum wage, so wives went out to find work along side their husbands. Oh yeah, and the absence of OSHA legislation meant that the men in the stockyards were often home for months at a time unable to work because of injuries. The bosses didn't mind, because they could just replace them if they were injured. After all, there were no unions.
Meanwhile, during the 1950's (unquestionably the era of the regressivist's ideal stay-at-home mom), American union activity was at an all-time high, NASA was putting men into orbit, the federal government was crisscrossing the nation in freeways, and every dollar that an American earned over $1,000,000 was being taxed at 85%. The regressivists want the benefits of the 1950's with the tax rate and deregulation of the 1890's. But of course, it was the regulations and the taxes that made the 1950's what they were. So maybe, it is the radical regressives who are truly trying to end the era of the stay-at-home mom if ever it actually existed.
So lets talk about the true flip side of feminism. When progressive policies created the conditions that made the stay-at-home mom an economic possibility, we neglected to recognize that we could have broken the mold of maleness and femaleness, instead we liked our hand and we doubled down. Now that the regressivists feel that they are under attack, they are doubling down again. Only this time, they are afraid that their dream of regression is never going to be possible. In essence, they are bluffing. They want America to abandon feminism. They want us to abandon our search for a better family, a better life, and liberation for men and women.

This is not the time to blink. We have the opportunity to expand the benefits of feminism to men. We have the opportunity to take the same benefits that created the possibility of the stay-at-home mom, and spread those benefits between working mom and working dad. Perhaps we can create a world where moms and dads spend more time with their family, not based on their gender or their sex, but based on their love for their families. It makes me angry to hear the women who wrote "Flipside" attacking universal day care and parental leave as evidence that feminism is a tool of the progress which they so fear, but it saddens me that their children will never truly know fathers who will spend their lives working for two, instead of learning how to be better dads.

What to Expect When You Already Know What the Heck You're Expecting

2011-02-21T08:04:00.000-08:00

Are boys inherently criminals who are uncaring, unloving, and unable to be empathic? An overwhelming majority of criminals are male, all American executioners are male, and (as discussed last month after the shocking shooting of Rep. Giffords) most American assassins are males. And reading "What To Expect in the First Year" when my son entered his 12th month, it's not very hard to see why.

A reader asked the authors of the book about her 11-month-old boy who, instead of bonding with a baby doll, was throwing the doll against a wall. What to Expect (hereafter WTF) responds, "Sexual equality is an ideal whose time has come, but sexual sameness is an ideal whose time never can come..."

Oh the sexism... Let's start at the beginning.

This woman's son doesn't know what a doll is, much less that he is throwing it at a wall. These are experiments in gravity and physics, not some kind of rejection of fatherhood. By insinuating that the son's throwing of this doll at 11 months is proof that he is already gendered as a traditional masculine boy, the authors of WTF are showing us how eager they are to protect traditional masculinity. As the stay-at-home dad of a 1-year-old, I can assure you that he would just as soon cuddle with a soccer ball as throw a doll against a wall, and the girl 1-year-old contingent is equally likely to commit violence on their dolls as my son.
The impossibility of what the authors call "sexual sameness" is a statistical mirage. While it is true that there is a difference between AVERAGE boys and AVERAGE girls, any individual boy is as different from other boys as girls (see Elise Eliot's, "Pink Brain, Blue Brain" for overwhelming evidence of this fact proven by an MIT professor of neuroscience). At the high end, the differences between boys and girls on any given trait is a five to three ratio. So while this is impossible to calculate, at least 30% of all boys are more caring and loving than 50% of all girls. Just as Lindsey Vonn can ski faster than (say) all of the guys on the slopes who think they are the fastest thing to hit snow since an avalanche, it is equally true that your son can may be able to cuddle and kiss any girl baby on the block. The gender differences that we encounter on a day-to-day basis are so unremarkable as to be almost entirely impossible to notice. Think about it, for every 5 boys that you meet who are aggressive, you will meet 3 girls who are also aggressive. Dr. Eliot points out that this is not enough of a consistent difference to make decisions about our children's lives, but...


Difference between boys' and girls' math scores.

unfortuantely we do make decisions about our children's lives based on exactly these loose statistical likelihoods everyday. In fact, WTF is stating clear as day that I should assume that my son is not one of the 3 boys who is more loving than 5 girls, but one of the 5 boys who is more aggressive than 5 girls. The statement seems like nonesense because it is nonsense.

But worse than being nonsense, it is downright offensive! Fifty years ago there was a common belief (unbacked by actual science) that girls were bad drivers. If this 11-month-old were a girl who repeatedly crashed a toy truck into the wall, the appropriate correlation would be to say that girls are just bad drivers from birth and there is nothing that you can do about it. The very idea that my 11-month-old son already knows what a baby doll represents and is determined to commit violence upon that doll is remarkably disturbing and a flat out lie. Boys as well as girls are being trained to be parents. Fathers are important parts of our society and they all come (quite naturally) from baby boys. Fathers do not throw their babies' against walls and they do love them so much that they would happily walk into a burning building to try to keep them from feeling any more pain than is utterly necessary. What to Expect, an otherwise excellent resource when kept in context, is unfortunately an agent of pain for parents who are being told that violence is an inherent part of being a boy but love, kisses, and cuddling are not.

If a baby girl would have thrown a baby doll into a wall repeatedly, it would be assumed that she was just too young to know what a baby doll represents, but when my son does it WTF (an parents across America) ignores all the evidence to assume that he is inherently violent. These assumptions have ways of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. Boys are given toys that they are supposed to like, violent toys about war and battles, and they are encouraged to play at the games that they are supposed to like by their parents, their teachers, and (most likely for we liberal minded parents) their peers. In a study of Asian girls, when the girls were told that the study was being conducted to test the ability of Asians to do math, the girls scores soared, but when the Asian kids were told that the study was about the ability of girls to do math, the Asian student's scores dived (see actual difference between boys' and girls' math scores above). If the entire society believes hard enough that boys will grow up to become the majority of criminals, then we can get together to create those criminals.

Be on notice... we men who are liberated will walk into burning buildings to stop people from making the assumption that our sons are inherently violent, and you can either join us by helping to liberate a man (or boy) in your life, or you can get out of the way.

Super Bowl Junk Food

2011-02-17T11:29:00.000-08:00

I passed another Super Bowl celebrating traditional gender. Just as I ate fried chicken, nachos and lots of chocolate chip cookies, I also scarfed down the gender junk on T.V. I have to admit that it was fun, and I can't get self righteous about this one, it's just fun!

I have tried to defend the Super Bowl with lines like, "It's not that masculine" or "It's just once a year," but no reason that I have found really excuses it. The only thing that I can say for it was that it made me feel good to be American, and to be a man.

Some masculinists out there think that means that it's harmless, but it clearly isn't. Domestic violence notoriously increases during football games, especially against women living in households routing for the losing team. Drunk driving deaths go up, especially in states where there are no blue laws. Drinking deaths also increase, as well as murder rates. Child Psychlogists have proven that children who watch football and other aggressive sports actually start to act more aggressive, especially boys. Overall, America during the Super Bowl seems like a hellscape.

But, of course, it isn't. The Super Bowl is a celebration of the traditional gender roles that have been running our society since the great shifts of the 19th Century with roots dating back to Abraham. One might conclude that if we enjoy the Super Bowl, and the Super Bowl is a celebration of traditional gender roles, than traditional gender norms can't be all that bad. But notice the leap in logic from enjoying something to that thing being not all that bad. A 500lb man can enjoy the two pound, bacon covered, cheese slathered hamburger that is the difference between loosing a limb and keeping it. A pedophile enjoys lots of things that are bad.

The Super Bowl is not a good equivalent to statutory rape, but it is a good equivalent to the massive cardiac attack inducing foods that they serve in the stands. Sure, not all of us are 500lbs, but those of us who are will be the most damaged by continuing our path towards hyper genders. In an era when Disney princesses have made a powerful resurgence, and the GI Joe movie was more violent than Schindlers List (but then again, many so-called PG-13 action movies are), perhaps we look more like the 500lb men in the wheelchairs and less like the 400 lb men on the field; more like the pedophile than the 14-year-old with a crush.

We have to get on in a world that is full of the hyper-gendered, and so we have to give cultural significance to gender celebrations like the Super Bowl. There was a time when the entire country celebrated the Miss America Pageant in a similar way, but the partial liberation of women has dulled the popularity of beauty pageants except among the most gendered segments of society. The Super Bowl is our annual celebration of masculinity. Just as a marathoner is free to eat a bucket of fried chicken every once in a while, a liberated society won't need to get rid of such masculine celebrations, just put them into context.

Hopefully, occasionally, rightbedone can provide that context.

Dirty Objectives

2011-02-05T00:45:00.000-08:00

An old friend recently sent me this article showing how teaching girls to play in the dirt is necessary for building resistance to germs as adults. Similarly, I think we can all see how teaching boys proper hygiene (for goodness sake men, wash your hands after you pee) is a goal with which we can all agree.

Much of this blog has been dedicated to showing how simple things like hygiene are tied to gender, and that therefore gender as a construct can be both powerful and harmful.

The problem with gender is not that boyness or girliness is bad as a whole, but rather that they are invented, not deliberately, but by tradition and history. Maybe most of the things that we bundle in with masculinity are terrific, but that doesn't mean that we should unquestioningly accept the entire bundle.

We should pull the bundle apart, trait by dirty trait, and keep what we like from both traditional genders, and learn from the dozens of non-traditional genders that have erupted in direct response to those traditional genders.

We should teach boys how to enjoy being clean and made up, and we should teach girls how to enjoy being covered in mud. A healthy person can do both, and the more we learn about the world through modern science, the more we learn that it is impossible to be healthy without a little soap... and a little mud.

Assassination; Another Gift of Masculinity?

2011-01-12T18:55:00.000-08:00

A clear pattern has emerged in every recent attack on American soil, from the Oklahoma City Bombing, Columbine, Bailey High School, 9/11, the Amish School House Attack, Virginia Tech, the Fort Hood Shooting, and even going as far back as the attempted assassination of Ronald Regan. And the assassination attempt on Rep. Giffords has not deviated from the pattern.

The pattern is so impossibly pervasive that we hardly even find it worth mentioning anymore.

It's almost as if we don't even notice it.

All of these murderers were men.

We can claim that each of these killers were insane, that they were deprived, and that they were the result of violent rhetoric on the right or the left, but how can we ignore that they were all men.

How likely is it that not one of these horrendous attacks would be perpetrated by a woman? Assuming gender equality, half of these attacks should have been carried out by women, right? If women are just as good as men, then women are just as terrible as men also. What about American Masculinity makes it possible that each one of these attacks was carried out by men? What about Masculinization makes it possible that almost all violent crime in America is committed by men?

Since our first interactions, little boys are trained to fight. We are given G.I. Joes while our female peers are given Barbies. We are playing toy guns, first person shooters, and football from elementary school onward. If we don't do these gender appropriate games in preschool or elementary school, we are under threat of alienation or violence (for more on the violence of masculinization see the MANifesto in one of the early sections of this blog). My experience was so violent that I have a hard time believing that there are places where boys who are not appropriately masculine are merely excluded, but some people tell me that is the case and I will not question their experience.

The tragic attacks on Rep. Giffords were not a freak occurrence, but part of a trend that we have been ignoring at our own risk. Masculinization is, at least partially, a violent process. Masculine violence demands a feminine victim, a victim who is beneath the masculine perpetrator.

There is good news. We need only to break away from traditional gender. Easier said than done, but still...

Hug Database

2010-12-27T18:07:00.000-08:00

A recent article on Huffington Post is about how babies benefit from openly affectionate parents, especially fathers. But I would like to spend a moment to think about how being openly affectionate affects the parents as well.

Without meaning to sound too corny, I think the ability to love is like the working out; the more you work out, the more you are able to work out. In order to truly love your child, you have to show your child that you love xir. Not only is this what it actually means to love somebody, but if your child doesn't know that you love xir, s/he can't love you back so it makes it more difficult to go on loving xir.

On top of flexing your "love muscles," being affectionate also helps us as people by reminding us that we are not alone. Men in particular are taught that they have to make their own way in the world, but that is a myth. Nobody can make their own way, with the possible exception of a hermit who makes all his own weapons out of twigs and rocks. Apart from that, we all rely on our society and their is no such thing as a self-made man. When we are affectionate to our children, we are reminded that we are vulnerable because we rely on them emotionally, just as we realize how much our parents actually rely/relied on us.

However, the mere vulnerability is not scary enough. Throughout our childhood, we were taught that the kind of love that parents and children feel for one another is not properly masculine. Boys who love their parents are mama's boys, or goody goodies who are perfect targets for other boys who are trying to prove their masculinity through gratuitous displays of violence. This violence scars men for life and leaves us afraid to show affection, even to our life partners and our children.

The author of the article (David Petrie) explains that, "when the time came to give my daughter her morning bottle, I'd pick her up, I'd look out the window to make sure that no one was driving through the corn fields to surprise me at my door, and then I'd quickly say, "I-love-you-I-love-you-I-love-you" before cradling her in my arms and plopping the bottle into her mouth." That kind of fear doesn't just come from healthy gender roles that we all should play. That kind of fear derives from the perpetual threat of violence that was beaten into all of us as children and continues to this day.

The good news is that his regiment of "I love yous" worked. He worked out that "love muscle" and can now say I love you at will. He has liberated that small part of his life from the oppression of traditional masculinity. I can tell you from experience that it feels great to be free!

The Costs of Fatherhood

2010-12-19T08:20:00.000-08:00

In an article entitled "The Different Costs of Motherhood," the economix blog on the New York Times outlines a study showing that women with simpler job skills who have children make roughly the same amount as their peers, while women with more complex job skills who have children make 20-33% less than their peers.

While making the comparisons between these groups of women, they briefly note that men's careers are hardly affected by children. Men succeed in earning more money by putting their families second, or more accurately by convincing themselves that earning more money is doing their proper service to their families. They are willing to move their families from city-to-city, and work endless tedious hours in order to ensure that they and their family succeed. In the survival of the fittest capitalist mindset, people either succeed by constantly growing and consuming more, or they fail. But at what cost?

The sacrifices of a higher skilled father is actually being made, not just by him, but by the entire family. When a father makes the choice to be as flexible as his childless peer and move to Dubai to pursue the big opportunity, he is either leaving his family behind, or taking his family along. If he is truly as flexible as his childless peer, then the opinions, desires, and needs of his family in making that move cannot be considered. He must be the captain of the ship. A captain is an exalted position, but the things that really matter in life have nothing to do with one's ability to captain one's ship. His position as a loving husband and father will always be secondary to his position as an earner, and that is the key to a life of alienation, even as he is surrounded by people who he loves. Like the kidnapper who tells himself that his hostage wouldn't leave even if he opened the cage, the father competing with his childless peers lives in perpetual cowardice that his family is actually only a swinging door away from leaving him.

The lesson to be learned from this story is that rating equality based solely on earning potential simply misses the point. A well lived life has nothing to do with one's CV. The fathers who are competing with their childless peers should aspire to making 20-33% less than their peers. We need to keep in mind that this study showed that the gap exists mostly among those with the highest earning potential, those Americans who are already making ends meet comfortably. These fathers are saying that the difference between living comfortably and living extravagantly is worth the time with their children. Unfortunately, we can easily calculate ones ability to consume the earth's resources by figuring out how much money we make (an overtly traditionally masculine calculus), but we still have no calculus for connecting with our loved ones.

Sexist or Feminist

2010-12-12T18:15:00.000-08:00

Now it's the time where I pick a couple of subjects loaded with symbolism and rate them on the sexism scale.
1= Sexist (tends to add to the problem of inequality and misery through traditional gender roles)
5= Neutral (either is really neutral or is used by both sexists and feminists to further their goals)
10= Feminist (creates happiness by breaking out of traditional gender roles)

High Heels: Some lip stick feminists claim that wearing high heels is feminist because it is a reclamation of femininity, but I think it is crazy to think that it is a feminist act to wear high heels because it is "pretty." Why? Because pretty means sexually attractive according to the traditional masculine notions. I would believe that it was actually pretty in a non-sexist way if it was considered attractive on men as well. So on the sexist or feminist spectrum, high heels are neither, but women who wear them claiming that doing so is a feminist act are kidding themselves.
Score-3
Stay at Home Moms: Many of them certainly feel under attack. There was a time when being a stay-at-home parent meant wearing a pretty pink dress, hosting Tupperware parties, and denying oneself the option of a career. However, that time is gone. In the modern era, after three decades of movement towards women's liberation, things have changed. Sure, there are still barefoot and pregnant types who are kept home by their evangelical husbands of the opinion that their wives should be submissive, but many of the stay-at-home moms that I meet (as a stay-at-home dad) are vigorously reclaiming the art of child rearing, which is the most important work of our society. The biggest potential pitfall is the continued inequality of numbers between stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads.
Score- 5

Man Whisperer?

2010-12-08T19:19:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I feel like I spend so much time on this blog attempting to figure out how to make feminism better that I forget to rant against the blatantly sexist ignorance coming from the right wing gender bigots. Well, now's my chance.

Fox News' (that's a good place to start ranting right?) Pop Tarts (even the column's name is offensive) recently reviewed a book called "The Man Whisperer." (The book title goes on attempting to sound pseudo intellectual by including a colon.) The basic gist is that women can control men by remembering that men "want nothing more than to be 'the man' in the relationship, the one who provides for and protects his woman."

Pop Tarts makes a point of telling us that the person writing this quote is female because she understands that what they are saying is sexist, she just doesn't understand that it is sexist to both women AND MEN!!!

If men are unable to handle successful women, it is because they themselves are still trapped behind the expectation that they should be 'the man' in the relationship. Liberated men love powerful women. Masculinity is enforced partly through alienation. A man who is insufficiently manly is uncool and undesirable. Although some women have started to see generosity, kindness and other paternal qualities as attractive, many men and women are still incredibly hostile towards men who are "pussies," "wimps," "pussy whipped," or "weak."

A man who is entrapped is, of course, terrified that his partner will find him weak and feminine. When a man's partner is more successful than he is, the threat is that he will die alone (although even saying it makes me sound weak and effeminate, which is why most men never admit it).

The answer, of course, is not to perpetuate that fear by playing the damsel in distress to the armor bedecked power lifting white knight. It is not to "stroke his ego" as the authors of "The Man Whisperer" suggest. The answer is to liberate your partner from the fear of alienation by exposing masculinity for what it is; a snare entrapping men into being oppressors with fragile egos who need to be broken like horses.

Prince Charming

2010-12-01T18:25:00.000-08:00

Nothing could be more true than that women have been stereotyped in children's films. For too long, women were weak and helpless, awaiting the savior in the form of Prince Charming who would not only protect them from their peril but also marry them therefore giving meaning to their lives.

However, the films often focused on the women. Aaron Sorkin defended his treatment of women in his new film "A Social Network" recently by saying that the multiple sexy women were objectives for his main characters, not characters in the themselves. These Prince Charmings acted the same way in old children's films from Snow White, to Cinderella, to Lady and the Tramp, and Beauty and the Beast. The women were weak, it is true, but the men in classic children's films were only objectives for those women to reach, overcoming their weakness by, either through brains or beauty, attracting a suitable mate.

Under the ill conceived influence of Third Wave feminism, modern children's films have attempted to make their films less sexist by making the women beautiful, brainy, and kickass. In Princess and the Frog, and now Tangled, the princess ends up saving the incompetent Prince Charming more than once. Rather than recreating the medium, these films have simply reversed the roles while hanging on to the discriminating values of a society that is not getting any closer to gender equality. Now women are expected to be both man and woman, the rescuer and the rescued, while men are now impotent paralyzed objectives. Even in this, they are still objectives because any woman worth her salt is still not worth any salt without a man, even if that man is utterly incompetent.

If we have women who can do "man things" in these films, why is it still impossible to have men who do "woman things" without it being a moment to laugh at that man's ridiculous incompetence? I do not blame the film makers. Film makers are merely the architects of the neurotic dreams of our society. The particular neurosis in these films is the inability to accept that traditional women's skill has any value for men. Equality will never be achieved until we can overcome that inability.

Sarah Palin is Right!

2010-11-24T04:31:00.001-08:00

Well, almost right at any rate. Here is a remarkably insightful quote from her new book which was released yesterday. “The women’s movement used to be about honoring for women the same God-given rights that our country honored for men. It used to be about dignity and hope. It used to be about respecting women by respecting their choices—whether it is to be a nuclear engineer or a stay-at-home mom—not denigrating them when they aren’t sufficiently like men.”

She has correctly identified how second wave feminism has been portrayed in the popular consciousness, and why there is a backlash away from feminism today.
However, she is wrong in so far as she thinks that feminism writ large has ever really been about “denigrating” women's choices. Even if some women in the movement were resistant to the “stay-at-home” mom ideal, many (if not most) feminists had children themselves, loved their children, and were willing to fend off Grizzly Bears to protect those children (regardless of whether or not those Grizzlies spoke with a Minnesota accent).
Palin is ridiculous in so far as she accuses liberals of being bleeding heart soccer parents who spoil our kids, while at the same time accusing us of being cold hearted bastards who “denigrate” stay-at-home moms.
Her answer to the problem of second wave feminism is to put the “girliness” back into the newly liberated women. She does not understand that “girliness” is a bribe to keep women from true equality.
Lastly, her style of feminism is a direct result of the Pandora's box opened by the lipstick sex-positive third wave feminists who tried to liberate sex, fashion, and one night stands without reclaiming child rearing, housekeeping, and relationship building. It is a short walk from “Sex and the City” feminism to "Pit Bull in Lipstick" Feminism.

So how can feminists break free of the unfair portrait that Sarah Palin has had so much success selling to America? We must reclaim traditional women's knowledge by sharing it with men. When men realize what they are missing, society will no longer look to the likes of Palin for expertise on gender equality because they will realize how completely Sarah Palin has been lying to us all along.

Home Ec-quality 101

2010-11-23T08:55:00.000-08:00

A massive home economics movement would help equality. Without knowing about work that has traditionally been the purview of women, men could not possibly understand the true value and skill involved in such work. The Kamahamaha Schools in Hawaii used to have cabins where their female boarding students lived with orphan infants and young children to learn the best practices of raising children. They were eliminated in the 1950's, but why? Why can't we start day care facilities, or classroom sharing that are set up in a similar way, of course under strict adult control. If we made these classes mandatory, the benefits would be significant.

Everyone, including men, would have knowledge about basic child rearing, including appropriate divisions of labor.
Fathers would be able to have at least some limited experience with babies under supervision before the were on their own.
The entire society would benefit from basic parenting skills, which is the fundamental building block of any society.
Free or low cost childcare would be built in, and both parents would be able to contribute financially as well as with real labor, creating more economic security for poor families and middle class families alike.

Most importantly, by having class time to explore the actual science of household management, we would all value these skills that have been relegated to a lower status. In fact, this work is very important, if not the most important part of life, and should be recognized as such and taught in our schools once again, but without the division of sexual differences. We can never have true equality until we start to realize that traditionally feminine tasks, like child rearing and housekeeping, are critical to our society. We can never see these tasks as equally important as business skills unless men and women are equally knowledgeable in these tasks. Learned helplessness is in fact not learned, but a lack of learning that creates perceived valuelessness.

Men Not Liberated Enough for Sex Work

2010-11-15T13:53:00.000-08:00

An interesting article interviewing Australian sex worker Zahra Stardust details how she came to embrace sex work, saying that "at [bachelor] parties, strippers would use measures of crowd control, humour and taunt to dominate, humiliate and ridicule their male subjects." In the past when I have criticized sex workers for reifying sex stereotypes, many women defended the role of the sex workers. Let me be clear, I am not willing to comment on whether the sex worker is liberated or successfully acting towards women's liberation, but I do know that sex work plays into the neuroses that ensnare and oppress men. Men are not able to be directly oppressed by women. It requires the intervening act of another man to oppress and reassert masculinity in men. Here's how it works when Zahra dominates her audience.

Men at strip clubs are there for the purpose of proving their masculinity. Enjoying and objectifying women are merely means of proof. While the women are performing for them, men are able to convince themselves that, as one conservative blogger put it recently, God's law is still in order and women are still subordinate to men.
Men who go to strip clubs alone are considered strange, at best. You're supposed to go with your buddies. Why? Because it does no good to prove masculinity to yourself. You have to prove it to somebody, because it isn't real unless it's recognized.
As Zahra is dancing, her audience is commenting on her dancing in degrading ways in order to convince themselves that, despite the 1960's, they are still hyper masculine. In the world of traditional masculinity, if you are not hyper masculine you risk abuse (sometimes merely social alienation, but often physical violence is employed to prove your weakness while being ostracized). The traditional object of abuse is woman. If men are subjected to that abuse it is a way of saying, "you are like a woman."
Lucky for all self-threatened masculine men, a strip club provides ample opportunities to act abusively towards women who are required to shut up and take it.

At the end of the article, Zahra admits to being an idealist. I think that might be the weakness of the many in the 3rd wave. They believe that men are not in need of liberation, that men are in on the joke when women use sex as a liberation tool. Unfortunately, as one who talks to a lot of men about liberation (in fact, as one who is obsessed with figuring out what it would mean to be a liberated man), I can confidently say that men are still frightened of the dynamic at play in sex work, even the most liberated of men. They may want to see the women in front of them as individuals and skilled entertainers doing the same thing with sex that great philosophers do with paradoxes, but to believe that, they'd truly have to be idealists.

Baby Shower

2010-11-11T17:23:00.000-08:00

I have been dis-invited from a baby shower. At first I was furious, but now it just makes me sad.

I am sad because I am a primary care-giver for a baby. My experience seems relevant to the soon-to-be mom, and they disallowed me from coming simply because I am not the right gender.

I am sad because the ritual of a baby shower is a significant opportunity to sit in a circle of sages to discuss child raising, and though many mothers will be in the room to share that wisdom, it will be kept as a secret from the father's of their own children.

I am sad because children that are hurt when their fathers are not invited to share and hear these lessons.

I am sad because instead of using this opportunity to share traditional women's knowledge with men and therefore recognize its inherent value, the women at this shower are ritualizing that knowledge so that men cannot understand it, and therefore cannot acknowledge it.

I am sad because fathers already have disadvantages when their child is born because they were not invited to partake in child rearing in their own childhood, and those fathers will feel all the more lonely, abandoned, and frightened when their child is born. They will feel either frightened or they will simply leave the childcare to their partners.

I am sad because these same women will expect their partner to help out in the first weeks of the child's birth, but because their partner will have no idea how to help, a great percentage of these women will be disappointed with their partners and unable to initiate sexual contact with their clueless partner for up to three years (see the previous entry at the end of October).

I am sad because I love being a part of my child's life, and these women want me to stay in my "place" and it makes them uncomfortable that I would rather talk about my son than hit golf balls and chug beer.

Although it is inappropriate for a straight male to admit it, when I was dis-invited, it made me very sad.

Oh well.

Why Charter Schools are Sexist.

2010-11-04T19:15:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of reasons to believe that we need school reform, but there are a lot more reasons to be resistant to charter schools. One of those reasons is that charter schools are sexist.

Charter schools are often pitted against the public schools because of the new-found belief that teachers are getting a sweet gig.

First of all "what?" Teachers used to be thought of, appropriately, as people who had way too much education to be making the pittances that they were making. These teachers aren't making a heck of a lot more than they were two decades ago, neither are their jobs more secure. They are simply public servants. Sure, they need to live, eat, and have health care, and even be rewarded for bringing their experience back to their school districts year after year as opposed to going off to a private school, but they aren't being paid nearly what private sector professionals with similar education, experience and skill are being paid. The only reason teachers do what they do is because they care. They are not out to get our kids. Teachers are spending everyday in the classrooms looking our children in the eye and telling them how to become better people.
If there is a reason that this particular union of professionals is being attacked, I suggest that it is because it is the most successful, and one of the earliest, jobs that women could do professionally. Even before women were entering the so-called 'worlds oldest profession,' women were staying home with the children from the tribe and teaching. Is it not a little suspect that at the same time that women are losing seats in the house of representatives for the first time since 1930 we are scape goating a union that is overwhelmingly women for the downturn of our education system, and therefore the downturn of our economy, our morality, and our status as a nation.
Similarly, we have trumpeted the successes of "Teaching for America," an organization that turns teaching into a therapeutic job, like working the cash register at Target or the grill at McDonalds. The fact that charter schools are hiring teachers that are not certified speaks to an ideology that believes that pedagogy is meaningless. Charter school advocates are essentially saying, "Teaching isn't a profession that takes years of training to know how to do well. Teaching is something that anyone with an education can do." The education that they are speaking about is an education in the traditionally male academic realm, as opposed to the traditionally female realm of pedagogy.

None of this would matter if charter schools were outperforming public schools, but the numbers repeatedly show that they are not. The results are mixed when looked at from the up and down numbers, but when one takes socioeconomic status into account, it is clear that charter schools are getting people with a higher SES and doing more poorly with them than public schools would have, and that more and more often, children in difficult SES are getting lost in the schools where the children of people who are too busy dealing with their own difficulties to advocate for their children go. The only reason that we ignore the facts that charter school are a complete and total failure is to perpetuate the myth to which all of us try so desperately to cling. Charter schools perpetuate the myth that traditional feminine knowledge, such as teaching, is unimportant, intuitive, and easily picked up along the way. By not valuing this knowledge, we condemn it to being left out of the public dialogue and the oeuvre of things that we value as a society.

Meninists?

2010-10-29T20:31:00.000-07:00

A blog called Meninist envisions a supportive role of men in feminism, but it neglects the basic facts about masculanization. It is not enough that men simply sit on the side lines like cheerleaders for women to catch up to men. Men must recognize how they too are oppressed and fight back.

Women will not attain equality until men too are liberated. Why?

Some schools of feminism have focused on equalizing pay and working conditions by getting women out of the home and into the work place.
At the same time, they have not made any effort to get men out of the workplace and into the home. If you don't believe me, see my last blog where I talk about how ill equipped men are to raise infants.
But when we say that women make too little, instead of saying that maybe men work too much (and therefore make too much), we are saying that domestic labor is not meaningful work because it is not "paid" work.
We degrade women by saying that the traditional realm of women is not as important as getting paid. We also oppress men by telling them that domestic labor was exactly what they thought it always was; thankless.

What we should be doing is not supporting women, but coming to the awareness that men and women should support each other in our scramble for equality and progress. After all, if we legitimately believe that the world will improve with more women in positions of so-called "power," should it not be equally true that the world would be better off with more men in positions of care-givers? Until we tell ourselves that power and money are not truly important, but a sideshow keeping us from equality, we will never actually recognize the important things in life.

Another Product of Masculinization: Less Sex

2010-10-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

This months Parents magazine included a story about how new parents have less sex, often having no sexual interest at all.

First of all, the article is written entirely from the perspective of new moms. It seems safe to say that if there is a problem with a couple's sexual health after the birth of a child, that problem affects both parents, and a magazine with the title "Parents" should address the challenges of both moms and dads.

But the article also managed to be sexist against women by implying that all of the problems with a healthy sex life were because moms just weren't interested in sex anymore. It put all of the onus on women to find their libido and get back into the sack. The article quoted many women and studies that said, "67 percent of wives report a major drop in happiness and a significant increase in hostility in the first three years after having a baby" and "my husband was not there for me" and "libido goes hand-in-hand with a helpful husband" and "when a partner hints at sex, it often feels like yet another demand on her." Yet, the reasons behind this lack of libido are said to be evolutionary. Every woman in the article seems to imply that if their husband would help them out more, they would feel like having sex more, but then they conclude, not that husbands should learn how to better engage with their children, but esentially "that's just how it is." Why wouldn't they look more closely at the role that men are playing in this problem? Because they don't want to face the facts...

Women cannot be fully liberated until both genders are liberated.

These men spent their entire lives living in ignorance about how to raise an infant. The stuff of infant childcare remained mystery to the partners of these women right through pregnancy. Even at the baby shower, when all of the tools for raising a child are discussed, secrets are shared, stories are swapped, and a group of people set about preparing themselves for the task ahead, many times men are not welcome. Why is that? Is it not enough that we keep boys out of practicing for their role of fatherhood by not letting them play with baby dolls, by not writing them into the babysitters' club, by sending them outside when it is time to feed baby or give her a bath? Do we also have to find it creepy that men are preschool teachers, or kiss their babies in public, or even go to the party to celebrate and receive gifts on behalf of their child?

And then women are surprised and depressed that their partners are unable to jump right in and help during the early years of their children's lives. I want to suggest a cure to these sexual problems. Baby college. Just like in the Harlem Children's Zone, send your partner to baby college (and maybe you should join him) so that when it comes time for him to leap in and help, he can do so with eyes open, instead of being scared.

To read more about what fear does to create masculanized men, please read the first 5 submissions of this blog.

The Wheels on the Bus

2010-10-07T05:06:00.001-07:00

Equality in parenting is the flagship of men's liberation. Just as women are fighting for equality in the workplace, men are fighting for equality in the home. Sometimes, we deny domestic equality to ourselves, as when we make the conscious decision to watch sports instead of doing domestic labor. Some of it is not voluntary. Like yesterday, when I was riding on the bus with several people, and all of them were enamored with the 7-month-old in my lap. Luca was fascinated with all of the attention, taking it all in by staring at each of his fans in the eye, which is a gender difference in and of itself. Boys who have been in daycare do not make as much eye contact as the girls in the crib next door, though boys who have been cared for by family members make as much eye contact as girls who are also cared for in the home.

When Luca turned his engrossing stare to me, I started to sing "The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round." Immediately, all of the people on the bus looked away from me uncomfortably. While I have seen strangers join in preschool songs for babies when mothers sing to them, I have noticed that I can bring an entire room to its knees by singing the controversial "Old MacDonald," or a treasonous daddy/baby rendition of Sandra Boynton's "Philadelphia Chicken." This subtle ostracism will continue, just as the Greek ostracism did historically, for about ten years until Luca is entering an age when it is acceptable for men to forge relationships with their children. Why are we afraid of men showing affection to their children? Do we believe that all men are lurking pedophiles? Are we threatened by improper masculinity? Are we just unused to the concept, like elementary schooler's are unused to romantic kissing, and even many adults are unused to same-sex kissing? Whatever the cause for this discomfort, it is real and it is limiting equality movements in gender, race, and class.

Daddy Kisses

2010-09-23T07:02:00.001-07:00

According to Stroller Derby blog http://blogs.babble.com/strollerderby/2010/09/22/should-dads-kiss-their-daughters-on-the-lips/ "An anonymous woman, who signed her letter “Want My Husband’s Lips for Myself,” finds her husband’s habit of kissing his 5-year-old daughter on the mouth to be “a sexual gesture and very inappropriate.”"

The writer's opinion derives from the belief that man are unable to control their sexual desires. We used to say that women were bringing it on themselves when they were raped because everybody knows that men can't control themselves. Second wave feminism, meanwhile, has rightly convinced that blaming the woman for their sexual assaults is wrong, but we haven't internalized the necessary corrolary that men are fully and completely in control of their sexual urges.

Masculinity makes men out to be animals, incapable of true relationships with women because they become sex machines the second they get a peck on the lips. I say, kiss your daughters, kiss your sons, kiss your friends. Liberate your lips! Let's have a national kiss your loved ones day and continue our liberation from masculinity.

Institutionalizing Women's Work

2010-06-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

Parenting has long been the province of mothers, and so the expertise in parenting has been developed over the course of millennia by women. This has led many to claim that the women's work of parenting was intuition based, and discredited as not knowledge based. However, much of what these women developed was valuable. Many children were raised successfully, healthfully and literate despite great odds. The best of the parenting technology developed by these women was often discovered by the wealthy (the oppressors) and used with their own children.
Powerful kings and wealthy lords deliberately sought out lower class women to raise their children, and often supplemented the technologies of these women with educators from Aristotle to Galileo. Eventually, America got into the act by forcing black women to raise the children of wealthy white slave owners, a trend that continues with chains of indebtedness and advertising driven desire instead of iron to this day.
During all of these millennia, women's work was used by the oppressor against the oppressed, even though the technology was developed almost exclusively by the oppressed. This is par for the course with human history. Education was used in exactly the same way until it was institutionalized to create equality by offering public schools and then by (attempting to) desegregate them in the 1950's. All technology is harmful until it comes into the hands of the people and becomes a tool for equality.
Starting in the 1950's, cognitive science started to make the women's work of parenting available to the people. It turns out that a lot of things that women have been doing for millennia were right, and a lot of other parenting techniques were harmful.
The Harlem Children's Zone has had an immense amount of success sharing this traditionally women's technology with people who never had access to it. The base of the Harlem Children's Zone is parenting classes. In this way, they began to institutionalize women's work and value it society wide, and as a result of giving it value we are creating equality. The Harlem Children's Zone has gone from having schools that were desperately below average, to average and above in only a little less than a decade, not by changing how children are educated, but by giving children's parents access to the best parenting technology. This technology was pioneered, hypothesized, and tested by women exclusively, and now it is being valued by society at large. More importantly, it is being valued as a skill by men, who are coming to realize that women's work may not be "intuitive" and therefore exclusive to women, and may therefore be accessible to everybody, the same way that office work and leadership roles are not exclusive to men.
This institutionalizing of technology is what made America great. Universal access to neccesities such as public education and governmental decision making create freedom precisely because they create equality, not in form but in fact. And it is this idea that continues throughout Europe, but has come to wither on the vine in the hands of people who proclaim themselve patriots while actively attacking the very thing that makes the country histroically notable. I suppose if I were busy attacking everything that was good about my country, I also would want to shout louder than anyone else in the room "God bless America!!!" because, like an abusive husband, I wouldn't want the country to wake up and realize that I was not contributing.

Encouraging Risk Taking

2010-05-15T11:53:00.001-07:00

We've all seen the stereotype of the father figure who watches his children playing out in the road while sipping a beer and leaning over to another man saying, "teaches 'em to watch out for traffic." This stereotype plays in to the traditional fatherly role as mostly a passive observer until it is time to protect the child physically from outside threats. While both the passive encouragement of risky behavior, and the physical protectiveness seem like opposites, what links the two roles is that they are both seen as not nurturing. In the last posting, I pointed out how protectiveness actually can be nurturing, so far as it enables our children to take risks. Here, I'd like to point out that encouraging risk taking is also nurturing. However, like protectiveness, if it is taken too far it can become harmful, even becoming neglectful. It is truly sad when a father does not participate in the child rearing to the extent that his children take unnecessary risks without his knowledge. On top of being harmful for the children, it also denies those men the most significant and enjoyable task of life, i.e. child rearing.
Men and boys take more risks when testing and in business. This risk taking has helped men ask for raises more often than women, and helped boys take more educated guesses on the SATs and ACTs than girls which results in higher scores, even though boys have worse grades on average than girls. Being able to take a risk is probably the thing that men are most able to turn to their advantage over and over again. If men are dominant in our society, one of the reasons is that they are far more willing to take risks. Particularly with girls, but also with boys, men in our society are in a better position to encourage safe but meaningful risks on a daily basis, from the playground to socializing. This talent is extremely important to the traditional women's work of parenting. We should not take seriously the stereotype of the bad father watching closely while his children to play with fireworks while Mom stands disapprovingly in the background. We should laugh at that stereotype because we know that those kids will score higher on the SATs than their peers, apply to more prestigious schools, seek more salary raises, and maybe even allow their children to take more risks than the children of the inactive father next door.

Protectiveness

2010-05-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

Men often use their urge to protect those around them as a tool for controlling those persons. We tell our loved ones that they cannot do dangerous things and deny our loved ones the ability to make their own mistakes and get hurt. We have to realize that our children have to be able to fail and get hurt or they will never become adults. However, there are times when all parents need to stand up and be a straight up papa or mama bear. Through questionable methods, men are given the tools at a young age to be forcefully protective and keep our children from harm. By harnessing this talent effectively, and channeling to healthy protectiveness, men can use it to make our children feel safe enough that they are willing to try, fail, get hurt, and then try again.

Men's Gift for Parenting (and Other Feminine Things)

2010-04-26T14:30:00.000-07:00

Just as we have come to acknowledge the gifts that women bring to the work place, we too should acknowledge the gifts that men bring back home. While we have this discussion, we must be careful not to accept women's or men's talents as inherent. We do not know how much of these traits are inherent and how much of these traits are learned because the overwhelming societal pressures put on us from infancy through until the day that we die. However, by acknowledging gender traits (be they nature, nurture or more likely a combination of both), we can have a discussion about which gender traits are a benefit for care giving and housekeeping. After all, the most important thing we will ever do in our lives is raise a child, and housekeeping is a part of all of our lives.

Since I became a father, I have noticed that some traits that I have associated with masculinity have helped me be a better caregiver. While, traditional masculinity often keeps men alienated from their role as a father, by examining masculinity and masculinization, I have been able to break from the harmful parts of masculinity, while attempting to keep those parts of masculinity that are helpful to care giving. The next few blogs will include discussions of some of those traits that are traditionally associated with masculinity, how they can help dads become better dads, and how they can hurt dads deeply by alienating them from their children if they go unexamined.

Who is We The People?

2010-04-19T17:48:00.000-07:00

Lately, I have been trying not to let this blog become party political. However, I will comment here on a Tee-Shirt that I witnessed several Tea Party Members wearing because it is the kind of thing that might go unnoticed if you didn't think particularly on the gender and race implications, and that is what this blog is for.

The shirt said, "I Am, We the People." This is one of two possible kinds of claims. It could be an historical claim. As such, it is accurate, but not exactly surprising. Clearly our founders meant older wealthy white males. According to a New York Times poll recently taken, the Tea Party is mostly exactly that. Note that if this were a woman of color making the claim that she was "we the people," it could also be seen as historical, but as recognition of how far the U.S. has come since 1982.

The shirt could also be a political statement. This is more likely what the wearers meant, because it is a more assertive and less obvious meaning. However, it has an equally racist and sexist meaning. The wearer is saying "I am, we the people" as opposed to you or they whoever you or they are. This divisive statement seems to reflect the position of Glen Beck that those who disagree with him are socialist, which is a scary and strange foreign political philosophy and therefore unAmerican. This defines the tee shirt wearer as a real American in exactly the same way as the historical meaning does, by holding as a positive example a political system that deliberately excluded those who were foreign and strange, namely black Americans, and those who were drawn to philosophies that resembled modern socialism, namely the Mechanics and the Guilds of New England. Those people were deliberately excluded in 1782 because to include them would be to diminish the power of the rich white male almost completely, a fear clearly expressed by the tee-shirt wearers even today. The insidious racial and sex question that lies below the surface is "Who then is a real American." I think we know what the wearers answer would be.

The Plague of Individualism

2010-03-30T09:16:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, despite my better efforts, I somehow manage to explain some of this blog successfully to someone. Their answer usually is, "I just try to treat everyone like an individual." As though I were trying to treat people like 6 headed hydras or something. "I'm sorry..." they seem to be saying, "I can't tell whether you are a boy or a girl, and if I could, I would ignore it." Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but when I meet a man, I treat him differently than when I meet a woman. For one thing, I don't speak to men at the urinal. To be fair, I've never tried speaking to a woman at the urinal. Also, I don't look men in the eyes until I am introduced. If you women (or people who identify as women) out there don't beleive me, try walking through Harlem or South East DC dressed as a man and looking everybody you walk past in the eye. I promise you will be beat up, or worse. I make decisions about people before I even meet them. We all do, it's how we survive.

We can't see individuals. All we can see are balls of social shit that we call individualism. So just get used to it. You will never be color-blind, you will never be gender-blind, you will never be able to see the "individual," and you will never be able to float like a butterfly to the rainbow land above the clouds. Jews have been trying to get rid of the badges of slavery for 6000 years. How are we able to overcome race and gender in less than 40? Hint: we're not.

Pro Male Hall of Fame

2010-03-13T16:49:00.000-08:00

Thank you to Dove for Men for commercials that make men look sexy, attractive, and fulfilled while highlighting their relationships with their children. The new Dove for Men ads are not pinpointing fatherhood as the point behind the ad, or trying to pigeon hole men as fathers, but just showing men as whole beings, and including in that whole being a portrayal of these men as kind and loving, even affectionate fathers. When I watch these ads, I am more confident than ever that the movement of which I write is already underway, and I am optimistic for my own sons future in this society.

Hall of Shame? All of the super bowl ads, and the Olympics Tide ads that could easily say "To their parents, they are all champions." but instead decides to say, "To their moms..." thereby leaving me to wonder, and what about me..? Do I have a place in this process?

Red Tent or Speak Easy?

2010-03-02T05:58:00.000-08:00

Over the past several months, I have joined my wife on perhaps the most magnificent and meaningful activity of human life. Week after week, I have watched her grow my child. During that time, I have attended 9 appointments to her midwives, and witnessed her give birth. I have witnessed and felt more than I knew I could or was welcome to witness and feel. Most of the time, I was the only dad in the waiting room. I attended and helped to plan a baby shower where only one man showed up (thank you Damian). Throughout the entire process, women and men alike were astounded when it was made evident that I had done my research and that I had opinions on how Luca would start his life. Like the Tide commercial that ran during these last Olympics ("To their mom's, they're always kids"), the entire process was aimed at moms, and the word dad never even came up.

However, I was welcomed by the midwives and doulas, and the women in my life who wanted to talk about the baby. If I felt uncomfortable, it was only because there was a bouncer to the door of my masculinity asking, "Are guys really supposed to be here? Oh yeah? What's the password?" At my wife's first appointment, the midwife proceeded with the gynocological exam without asking me to leave the room, and casually offered to show me the cervix. It was clear at that moment that the flap to the door of the "Red Tent" was wide open, and it was only my self-oppression, my inner-masculinity-bouncer, that kept me from going in. But I went in. What was the pass word? A simple, "Thank you, yes."

The Sadness/Madness of Groping

2010-02-20T07:20:00.000-08:00

Sexual assault and sex work has long been considered linked to sexism against women, but part of the point of this blog is that all oppression of women is at the same time self-oppression. Groping (a.k.a. sexual assault) is one obvious example.

A woman who is sexually assaulted is ashamed by the attack and also deeply hurt, and we should not downplay that fact, but we should also consider how it is always true that men are the ones who are overwhelmingly the sexual assaulters. What is it about maleness and masculinity that leads men to such unhealthy sexual relationships with the people around them that they are driven to, or aroused by, forceful and violent interactions with strangers whom they are victimizing? While there are some who say that groping is inherently male, I disagree. Groping is inherently masculine, but not male. Men are not bad people somehow evolutionarily driven to sexual deviance any more than women are evolutionarily unable to handle themselves in the work place, or driven to "hysteria" by over-exercise. But men are trapped in the self-oppression of masculinity, and one of the rules of our self-confinement is that our relationships cannot be overly healthy or loving. We must remain aloof, the bread winner, the cowboy with no ties to our families or our lovers who inevitably make us weak or (horror of horrors) "pussies." But we are still sexual animals and have a need for affection. When healthy love and sex are not available to us, we will fulfill our needs through unhealthy desperate means. How better to remain aloof and unhealthy, while satisfying our sexual desires than to make our victims into the objects of our affections ? No movement for women's equality will be complete until men are free of their self-oppression, because as long as men need victims, women will have to be those victims.

Formal Equality= Global Warming Skeptics

2010-02-11T04:48:00.000-08:00

For some reason, global warming skeptics seem to believe that a snow storm, or a cold snap disproves the basic and easily proven fact that the global temperature is, in fact, rising. No matter how many times reasonable people try to explain to them that warmer air means moister air and therefore large storms become more likely, or that single weather anomalies are not particularly relevant to the global climate, they will not believe any data unless it is easy and straight forward. What does this have to do with formal equality?
When people say that equality under the law is enough, they point to successful women and black men, rather than looking at the larger statistical picture which shows that schools are more segregated than before Brown v. Board, that neighborhoods are more segregated than before 1968, and that the unemployment gap continues to grow with almost 40% of black men in the District of Columbia unemployed. They would like to point to Barrack Obama and say, "see, there is no more racism because a black man is president."
Occum's razor applies to scientific theories, not the data being collected to prove those theories. Occum's razor does not support using only one datum. That's not how one simplifies a test. In order to be valid, we must collect as much data as possible and then find the most simple explanation for all of that data. When we collect all the data, we see that despite a cold winter here, or several big snowstorms there, the global temperature is actually rising, and despite a black man being president and a woman appointed to secretary of state, the senate is still mostly older white men. To ignore these facts is stupid, ignorant, or part of a deliberate attempt to undermine America and the world.

Man Up!

2010-02-08T06:40:00.000-08:00

Although, the Super Bowl Ads last night did not have as many bimbos offering themselves to the male viewers, they were still laden with anti-man/ pro-masculinity content. While the typical anti-man ads are filled with beautiful women in a way that (obviously objectifies and dehumanizes women and) undermines the male viewers understanding of healthy sexual expectations, the ads last night offered an entirely different way of undermining men. One Dodge commercial spent a long time talking about what men give up everyday. What were these inexcusable slights to men? Things like listening to your spouse as she talked about her day. Atrocities like caring about what your spouse buys and wears. One commercial for a hand held television showed a man following around his bimbo girlfriend with a bright red bra draped across his shoulder and looking sad and emasculated. How were these men supposed to escape or excuse the shame that they feel by supporting their partners? CONSUME!!!
These ads are trying to shame men into buying products that can "save" their masculinity. But, at the same time, they are shaming us out of healthy relationships, and even good sex. There is something erotic and delicious about brazenly following around your girlfriend with a bright red bra draped across your shoulder as if saying, "that beautiful woman is sharing her sexuality with me, aren't you jealous?" These ads are trying to undermine the importance, the deliciousness, and the meaningfulness of our relationships with women. Don't let them succeed. Do not be a slave to shame. Masculinity is not worth being saved.

Daily Show Watchers are Stoned Slackers

2010-02-05T18:04:00.000-08:00

Bill O'Reilly told Jon Stewart that Daily Show watchers were all stoned last week. Just a quick note, Bill. In my law school, if you hadn't watched the Daily Show that day, there was someone in the study group who could give you a play-by-play, and if none of us had watched it, we would stream it on our laptops during a study break. Perhaps some of us were stoned, but there were enough of us who passed the bar and have gone on to successful careers (and still watch the Daily Show everyday), that I'd be hard pressed to call us slackers. P.S.- as a response to the complaint that Fox News is pushing an agenda, not reporting the news, the critique rings hollow. It's most reminiscent of Pee-Wee Herman's famous "I know you are but what am I" rhetorical tactic.

Formal Equality

2010-02-04T03:51:00.000-08:00

The new face of discrimination is formal equality. The Supreme Court can hide behind formal equality when they legalize the exclusion of persons of color from colleges, or the exclusion of women from higher ranking jobs. Most recently, the courts have fallen back on on formal equality to give the rights of citizenship to corporations. They use the argument that labor unions and trial lawyers will be able to spend as much money as they want on campaigns, so it's okay that corporations are able to spend as much money as they want on political campaigns. First of all, they are implying that there are only two possible points of view, that of the labor unions and trial lawyers (which somehow is the same) and that of corporations. Just because trial lawyers support democrats, and labor unions support democrats, doesn't meant they could get along if they had to wait in the same line at Dennys. This formal equality bigotry is pervasive and unstoppable, but worse, it is entirely ungrounded in facts or reality. This February, coming off a fantastic Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I have to think that MLK didn't see this coming, and he would have been upset that the country is using his name, and his most famous words, to promote formal equality at the expense of actual equality.

The Problem With the Economy

2010-01-28T04:43:00.000-08:00

We experimented with replacing government regulation with insurance and derivatives to create a sustainable and secure economy. It started in 1980 with Ronald Regan, and ever since then the economy has been fraught with turmoil, up and down like a manic depressive 1950's housewife. This latest crash proves, beyond all doubt, that derivatives do not secure risk, but only secure profits. It is time to bring back the Roosevelt regulations and remember that the Republicans are the banks' booty call, not populists defending the people. If we cannot be excited about Democrats, because they are all moderates, we can at least agree to be excited about marginalizing the Republicans, and none of their desperation should be considered anything more than tantrums intended to defend Wall Street, or at least the corporations that make most of their profits being traded on Wall Street.

Hidden Brain

2010-01-25T04:33:00.000-08:00

Please don't fool yourself into believing that saying nothing about race and gender, or raising your child so-called race blind and gender-neutral will keep your child, or yourself, from making assumptions based on race or gender. Science has proved that by saying nothing, we say that the status quo is correct. Three-year-olds are already able to make assumptions based on race, and gender assumptions start in the womb. If you don't talk about it, you foster it. So I propose this challenge. Think and talk about race and gender everyday. If you work with only white people, think about why that is. If you work with people of color, think about how you interact with those people and if your "hidden brain" may be making assumptions for you. If you work with women, do the same. If you don't work with women, quit.

Okay, New Format.

2010-01-23T03:07:00.000-08:00

I loved the MANifesto, and I finished it, but became aware that no one was reading it. Which is okay. Therefore, I'm going to try to go to a shorter format that is less dependent on reading the previous submissions. I understand that our Twitter generation is not able to grasp complex topics as often because of our wanting boil things down into shorter formats, and that is why I am eschewing complex topics, and trying to boil complicated issues into short paragraphs. This is doubly great, because our generation is extremely impulsive, and I think I can turn this blog into something way more impulsive, and hopefully, from time to time, amusing. Therefore, Right Be Done, is now equality based turrets syndrome with a hint of "fuck you." If nobody reads it, at least it will be cathartic.

MANifesto: Part V

2009-11-11T00:54:00.001-08:00

Dating and Marriage
Men often say, “I love women” when they are about to say something disparaging about all women. The most aggressive men often say terrible things about women and worse things about men who act like women. However, at the same time, they openly make brazen displays of desiring women and those things that women have to offer. It is true that women have a lot to offer men, as do many of the skills and jobs normally associated with feminization, but why can men earnestly say “I love women” but “women are bitches” in the same sentence without recognizing the contradiction? Because men’s feelings towards women are a tool of maintaining aggressive masculinity, men have agreed that how much a man desires a particular kind of woman gives the man points in his ever constant struggle for secure and aggressive masculinity. Below are some of the rules of the game.
Men do not desire just any women, but a particular kind of woman which is constantly changing according to cultural preferences. The feature of aggressive masculinization’s preferred mate is that they must be hyper-feminized. A group of men decide how many points each woman is worth by deciding as a group how closely the woman looks like the perfect mate. Men play this game outwardly by actually rating women on a scale of 1 to 10. Men who secure a “10” are considered the most masculine. They are respected, and envied by other men. But they are also sought after by women who want to be looked on as a “10” in their own right. Those men who can only secure a “1” or show no interest in women whatsoever are subject to the same kind of taunting as in their childhood. They are called “faggot” and told that they are not properly men. When their mates are derided, some feel as though they must resort to violence in defense of the woman they love, and also in defense of themselves. They are then under threat of the same kind of physical manifestation that brought about their original insecurities about masculinity.
The fact that groups of men decide what it means to be a woman based entirely on arbitrary preferences, leads women to starve themselves, work their bodies unhealthily, and even put themselves under the knife to appease the men they love or want to love. Also, men who do not fit the paradigm of aggressive masculinity often find themselves without a girlfriend, wife, or partner of any kind. As a result, many men are now using steroids, going on damaging diets and having surgeries themselves. Some men think this is wrong because it is too feminine and proclaim that men who diet are “pussies,” but these men miss the point. Men who mutilate themselves and use dangerous drugs to appease women, men, or anyone else are subjecting themselves to the same damaging and arbitrary objectives that have so long oppressed women. The lesson to be learned is that replacing masculinity with femininity is not necessarily applause-worthy. Hyper-gender of any kind should be eliminated before any of us will truly be free.
Sasha Grey, a porn star, recently told Rolling Stone magazine that she wants women to know that “It’s okay to be a slut.” While some find this statement empowering, it is complicated by latent hostility towards Ms. Grey herself and her own gender. She was not saying that “Slut is not a bad word” but rather, in the traditional sexual sense, she was saying “It’s okay to be bad.” Behind her words, one has the feeling that she senses that when women sleep around they are being bad feminized women, but somehow good role models for women who are liberated. One reason behind this ambivalence towards the sexually active woman is that we have pulled apart the feminine role in sex without pulling apart the male role so that only greater or lesser degrees of the male roles perpetuate. There are two problems with the survival of the traditionally masculine sex role. Sex from a traditionally masculine perspective is demeaning to women, so that empowered women must somehow love having sex but hate themselves for loving it. In a society laden with religious overtones about sex, this unhealthy dichotomy is unavoidable for women and men. But also, when women adopt a traditionally masculine role in sex there is the unsaid assumption that the masculine role is not also unhealthy and damaging.
The masculine role model for sexuality, however, has always been unhealthy. Men traditionally objectified and even bought women for their sexual labor. They denied homosexual love even existed, while punishing those who engaged in homosexual “acts” to horrible punishments. One notable case in early New York City condemned a man who was caught have sex with his fellow sailor to have his arms and legs ripped form his body before he was thrown in the sea. Additionally, instead of undermining the system of objectification, some women find empowerment in objectifying men, as though it would be equal if only Native Americans were allowed to have tiny reservations full of white people on the reservations we have left them. Instead of believing that feminine empowerment means acting masculinized on sexuality, we must find some healthy third option that is healthy and empowering to both sexes. Before we can do that, we must admit that both sexes are oppressed by traditional gender roles, otherwise we risk continuing to glorify the masculine role which simply means oppressing both genders equally.

MANifesto Part iv: The Self-Made Man

2009-10-07T04:55:00.000-07:00

Although men’s bonds with other men are incredibly trustworthy and powerful, the masculine notion of success idealizes a man who succeeds all by himself. In a society, all people must rely on each other completely and intimately. The myth of the self-made man is false because every successful person must have employees, aids, confidants, business partners, subcontractors, customers, stockholders and numerous other people complicit in that success, including that self-made man’s domestic partner and children. However, men have much to gain from associations with masculinity in capitalist America. Our notion of masculinity includes wealth. Without wealth, we are unable to provide safety and security for those that we love most dearly. Society tells us that the people who men love are safer if men spend their days securing capital wealth and success, but at what cost?

In a capitalist society, one man’s success is often another’s failure. One man is promoted, while another is not. One man’s business succeeds, while another’s filling the same niche must fail. Because security in any society is tenuous, and more so in a capitalist society, the notion of being a self-made man is directly tied to safety. If a man feels like he is relying on anybody else, he is unsafe and less of a man. This lack of safety is not unlike the lack of safety felt in the schoolyard in our boyhoods. However, this fear is entirely false. Time and again, it has been proven that reliance on others makes us safer, not less so. The very basis of America is that all men are better equipped to rule a nation than any one individually, and after 1920, all people are better equipped than all men. Tragically, while men feel threatened by reliance on strong social groups, it is in fact self-made-ness that threatens us the most because if we attempt to provide for our families alone, then our own failure will utterly collapse our family.

Sometime in the last several centuries, people agreed upon the man’s role as the breadwinner who brings home the bacon. Men feel satisfied with the role because it is important and significant. But while one person brings home the bacon, another must cook it, and still others must enjoy it. When we put so much importance on earning money and food, we automatically undermine the traditionally feminine role of using those resources to make a healthy and stable family, and in doing so we risk the healthy and stable family by alienating the father.

Unlike the trivial and short term suffering of children in the schoolyard, the fear of a father attempting to secure the safety of his family is long term and profound. Having tied masculinity with providing for the family, such a failure becomes feminization. In such a way does femininity come to equate with joblessness, homelessness and even starvation and death. A common, and false belief, is that homeless persons just aren't willing to work hard enough. Poverty comes to equate with feminization and conversely wealth with masculinization (a myth not aided by the fact that most poverty is caused by divorce, meaning that most people thrown into poverty are women). Gangsters and mobsters can easily become the ideals of masculization because they combine physical violence with the ruthless pursuit of wealth.

Similarly, some have become so focused on the pursuit of wealth that they never seem to have enough. If these men are made masculine by making more money, working harder, and being promoted before other men, than not being promoted, making less money, and spending more time at home feminizes those who do not succeed.

The greatest success of the women’s liberation movement has been to undermine the femininized corollary to the self-made man that women are useless and only survive as the recipients of the benevolence of the man who made himself without her help. Unfortunately, some women have countered with a self-made woman myth. However, business women and women politicians are resigned to the fact that sexism pervades the self-made woman myth. That is so because the notion of being self-made cannot be separated from the worst aspects of masculinity, fear, oppression, and suffering. Sexism cannot be ended until the self-made person myth is exposed as the ridiculous fraud that it is.

Manifesto Part III: Fraternal Groups

2009-09-15T14:04:00.000-07:00

Men in groups are remarkably trustworthy and loyal. They often act against their self-interests to aid a friend. The power of the bonds between men is a great and compelling attribute. However, these relationships often become abusive. Sometimes, fraternal groups bond through masculinization that becomes more and more extreme as members of the group feel more and more disempowered by their lives. The bonds they form are filled with boasts and bravado. Some men boast about their athletic abilities, their cars, their grade, their salaries or their property. Eventually, however, the boasts ring hollow because these limited measurements of success do not in fact prove maleness, and the groups are faced with the choice of becoming vulnerable or continuing their boasts into impossibility, desperation, and panic. Those fraternal groups that do not allow themselves to become vulnerable and admit their weaknesses express their panic with one another in ever more cowardly and abusive ways that often lead to violence, crime or abusive name calling (the word “pussy” is used a lot). Men need to relate with one another, and they should, but vulnerability is not masculine, so how can they do so?
Because conversations about feelings and priorities are often considered feminine, men often relate indirectly through some form of entertainment. These media are too often ways of reinforcing masculinity. Men talk about sports, action films, (often violent) video games, women’s bodies, and hunting among other things. In talking about these things men are reified in their masculinity at the same time that they teach masculinity to others listening. As men become more secure in their ability to present masculinity, and their bonds with one another become stronger, they will explore more feminine forms of entertainment, or even talk about emotions, feelings, and family life, but even then they regularly revert to masculine media as ice breakers. In this way our bonds to one another become bonds to the tyrannical fear mongering masculinity of our childhood.
Even with the safety mechanism of masculine entertainment casting its shadow over men’s friendships, occasionally they grow to love other men in meaningful ways. However, they are afraid to express their love for fear of being feminized by being associated with homosexuals. They cannot even tell another man that they love him without adding the word “man” to the end of the phrase in order to reassert the masculine nature of their love. Even more frightening is the possibility of touching these men in any kind of caring or loving manner. Because team sports replicate the masculinizing influence of physical violence, they are allowed to embrace each other in a scrum, hug one another in a game of tackle football, and grope each other in a half nelson. However, without the protection of simulated violence, even a hug can be uncomfortable and kissing has been made repulsive. Of course, repulsion is a kind of fear, in this case of physical contact that, if enjoyed, will be a force for feminization that will leave them under threat of violence.
Friendship brings with it great satisfaction and happiness. These relationships also bring stability, as most men know that there a some other men on whom we can trust with our lives. But these relationships are hijacked when they are allowed to become tied to masculinization.

Manifesto Against the Opression of Masculanization: Part II

2009-08-25T10:32:00.000-07:00

Bribes and Punishments
If this manifesto is ever widely read, there will be a large number of men who will be bewilderingly infuriated by it. Whenever masculinity is threatened, dark knights of chauvinism will immediately race to its aid. They will attack with the kind of fury normally reserved for traitors, murderers, terrorists and other enemies to the nation’s safety and security. Why? Because when masculinity and manhood are attacked, men who are insecure in their masculinity get scared. They are scared because that is not the deal that they got into when they agreed to go along with the whole thing. They thought the deal was that penis equals masculinity. To say that penis does not equal masculinity, that even heterosexuality and attraction to women does not equal masculinity, that masculinity is a farce, is a terrifying proposition. They’ve given up their connection with their families, healthy relationships with the men and women in their lives, physical contact with people other than their wives, and much of the time that they have on this earth in order to prove their masculinity. If I say that they can never prove their masculinity, because the whole thing is bullshit, they have wasted everything. That’s a lot to give up for a system of oppression. Why would they do it?

Schoolyard Bullying
In schoolyards around the nation, in backyards, and in living rooms, boys are teaching masculinity to other boys through physical violence. The inspiration for these malicious beatings are myriad, but the notion that a boy who doesn’t fight back is somehow derogatorily feminized (hereafter “feminized”) is practically universal. The notion that feminization is bad cannot be better emphasized than with physical violence. The notion that those who fail to repel their attackers are not masculanized enough immediately instills terror in those who are unsure of their own masculinity. Masculinity is the oppressed man’s only means of defense. The irony is that in attacking others (and thereby feminizing these third parties) they can prove their manhood for moment. Like using an air conditioner to combat global warming, they are making themselves more safe from masculinity, while aiding masculinity generally. The schoolyard bully is created from a constant fear of being feminized ourselves and is constantly reinforcing.
Eventually we become oppressed men and the haunting ghost of the schoolyard bully hangs over us for the rest of our lives. Eventually, the words, “pussy” “fag” and “bitch” become linked in our heads with the brutal beatings and tauntings we received at the hands of those who were not comfortable with their masculinity. Meanwhile, there are those who learn their lessons too well. Some literally beat men who are too feminized. Their victims, who are not manly enough, threaten their belief that penis equals masculinity, and leads these men to unspeakable violence and even murder. Tragically, even as they prove their own masculinity and relieve their fear at being feminized, they strengthen the link between feminization and violence by victimizing those who they fear they will become if the link between penis and masculinity is ever severed.

Manifesto To Eliminate Masculinization (Part One)

2009-08-18T12:59:00.000-07:00

Men are caged by fear, suffering and unhappiness. Suicide rates, self-destructive behavior, and neurotic violent tendencies belie this fact. This group must consciously support the quiet and radical revolution already under way. We must free men!
The women’s liberation movement cannot succeed until men too are freed from traditional gender’s tyrannical grip. Only a concerted effort to liberate men will provide significant race and national origin equality. Anti-gay bigotry, above all other kinds of prejudice, is rooted in the maniacal maintenance of traditional masculinity (hereafter “masculinity”). Therefore, the next logical step in the continually progressing civil rights movement must be the liberation of males from masculinity.
The women’s equality movement has begun to liberate men, kicking and screaming, but only with a more concentrated effort on the destruction and reconstruction of masculinity can we advance the freedom of men. Likewise, without a full frontal assault on masculinity, women’s is ended, and will not be able to progress, because women and men are intimately connected. Many women share their most intimate relationships with men, and so long as a man is suffering, so too will any person of empathy who loves that man. Suffering is the root of all fear, and fear is responsible for paralysis and retreat. When suffering does not bring about fear, it brings anger. Men should be angry that they are suffering at the whim of improbable oppression. However, all too often, that anger irrationally becomes violence against those who most desire to end their suffering. Too often, that same suffering is turned into violence that is used to make sure that other men suffer. This society can end the suffering of men. Society must direct its anger at masculinity itself and, finally, after millennia of the most insidious and malicious oppression, we must liberate ourselves.
In the next couple of weeks, this blog will publish a manifesto of freedom for men and all persons who have ever had any relationship with men. Acknowledging that if men are freed, it is due to feminist and critical race thinkers, this writing is not a work of academics, but a work of punditry and passion at best. In the next entry, the nature of the Masculization process will be shown to be a cycle of violence filled with bribes and punishments. After that, different specific functions of masculinity will be highlighted for elimination, from capitalism (an inherently masculine and violent method of societal interaction) to the male eviction from the home.

Today's Ridiculous Thought

2009-08-15T06:00:00.001-07:00

When I protested the war in Afghanistan, I was accused of being anti-American by the New York Post and Lynn Cheney because I had the dastardly opinion that war with Afghanistan would not lead to Osama Bin Laden's capture, and might just contribute to islamophobia and racism already running rampant throughout the country. Now, these same accusers are disrupting democratic meetings and shouting other people out of debates merely because others disagree with them. What is anti-American? I wouldn't be able to say. Murder definately is anti-American. Beer drinking definately is American. Expressing an opinion (that turned out to be true)? Preventing others from expressing opinion by shouting them down in a meeting?

Corporations Are Incompetent

2009-08-12T06:14:00.000-07:00

What is being left out of this health care debate (if you can call the vitriol coming out of the right a debate) is the utter incompetence of most corporations. It is not an accident that corporations are incompetent, in fact the entire legal entity of a corporation is designed to encourage incompetence. It is tantamount to national suicide to continue to permit corporations to have anything whatsoever to do with health care, a fact which is being debated between the moderates and the left, but which the right wing ignores in their adulation for everything corporate. Yet we all know that corporations are horrible at what they do.

Corporations are Unsustainable
We see everyday that corporations are unsustainable. Just this year, the U.S. Government, and the many other governments throughout the world, have had to swoop in and bail out thousands of corporations which were failing. The U.S. Government, in substantially the same form that it stands today, has outlasted almost every corporation in the world, and has done so with such amazing success that even today there is no threat (despite what Glen Beck may desire) that the U.S. will not be a beacon of hope and freedom for huddled masses throughout the world. Meanwhile, corporations are constantly going into bankruptcy and folding into one another, or merely liquidating and disappearing. If we rely on corporations for necessities like health care, we will are relying on some of the most fragile organizations on earth. The moment that a corporation stops making enough profit (that means more than just profit, but profit mixed with greed), the corporation will raise its prices or merely leave the market. That is the job of a corporation; maximizing profit at the expense of its customers, its government, and all moral and ethical considerations.

Corporations are Unaccountable
We all know that corporations don't want to listen to their customers. Although corporations make it out to seem as though their customers are their friends, in fact corporations and customers are necessarily opposed. As competing entities entering into one contract, each party necessarily attempts to get as much out of the contract as it can. Verizon and Comcast cable seem like they are on your side when they lobby congress to implement fewer controls on internet distribution, but they have ultimately charged more in the United States for broadband internet than in any other country in the world, including island nations with limited resources. That is because the position of customer to corporation is naturally hostile. The fact that they have to woo you in order to ensure that you buy from their corporation is meaningless because advertising does the wooing and advertising is purposefully misleading.

Of course, corporations are supposed to be unaccountable. It's impossible to make any serious money unless the corporation treats the customer as though they are used, spent and discarded goods. If the corporation sells a service, then it will attempt to cultivate the customer, like a neglected house plant that you hope doesn't die. Occasionally, and for a short amount of time only, a corporation will make a good faith effort to hire enough customer service staff and offer the best product at the best possible price. The corporation gets some word of mouth, and attains incredible loyalty for merely making the least bit of good faith effort, for merely showing up at the party. But eventually, the economy must contract and the corporation has to do something to cut costs. Maybe the first two or three economic down turns the corporation rides the wave, maybe eventually it cuts services or stops taking as many risks. But at some point, the shareholders (who are lean and anxious for profits) vote in a new board of directors, who vote in a new president (often in a hostile takeover situation) and the new president is desperate to keep his (usually male) job. In order to keep his job, he must appease the board immediately, and the board must appease the shareholders, so the new president must make cuts and raise profits and pull dividends immediately. The fastest way to do that is to cut from the customer service budget. With each computerized telephone answering service, and redirection to India, and separating out of phone rooms between offices, cities, states, countries, and continents, the service gets cheaper, slower, and less responsive and OH SO PROFITABLE that Donald Trump gets turned on just thinking about it!!!!!!!

The Beginning of Corporations: The End of Competence
We all know intuitively that corporations are incompetent. We have all been on hold for hours attempting to fix a typo made by a data entry professional in India that the corporation refuses to accept was a typo. This is how profits are made. Hopefully, the customer will eventually give up and pay instead of risking having their credit ruined after months of playing three hour long phone tag with the behemoth on the other end.

The corporation is designed to be incompetent. The corporation is a legal construct that does one thing. It makes it (very nearly) impossible to hold shareholders responsible for the losses of the corporation, and if shareholders aren't responsible (and they are the only ones with any power) than no one is responsible. It means that shareholders can invest $500 and the only thing that they may lose is that same $500, while potentially earning much much more. The shareholders hire the board of directors and the board hires everyone else. In the modern world, the shareholders are usually corporations themselves who are equally unaccountable and incompetent. The shareholders are large banks that vote on behalf of their own customers. The banks have a DUTY to make as much profit as they can for their customers. In order to do that, they have an OBLIGATION to find board members that ruthlessly chase after profits. That is a legal obligation. If they don't do that, they can actually be sued. The board is REQUIRED to hire a president and staff who all are interested in only one thing... net profits.

Nobody is accountable to anything except for profits, regardless of how they make profits. The only thing that is standing in the way of all that money is the customer. Thus, a corporation that knows that asbestos or the Pinto is killing people is legally obligated to decide whether or not it should continue to kill people based solely on the cost of litigating the wrongful death suits versus the cost of changing the design of the Pinto or recalling asbestos. Thus are corporations murderers, murdering solely for profit. In America, we would execute a person that killed hundreds of people motivated solely by profits, but yet Ford continues to exist because it is a corporation and thus all the shareholders, the bosses of the bosses of the bosses, are entirely protected for their homicides.

Get Corporations Out of Health Care
The only way to make health care accountable is to keep corporations as far away from it as possible, and this makes sense. Many of our ancestors died attempting to bring democracy to decision making in the United States, yet the right now wishes to have us remove all democratic decisions from our choices in health care. The truth is that democratic methods are dangerous and scary but they are the best method we have been able to determine to make any kind of good faith society wide decisions. If we admit that health care is a society wide problem then we must admit that health care requires a society wide solution. The only way to have a society wide solution is through democracy, that premise is the one on which America is founded.

Science is Not Truth

2009-06-24T04:48:00.000-07:00

On further analysis, I have decided that science fits better with hope than it does with history. History and Religion are more properly located in studies that explore what is and what was. These are explorations in big-T Truth, unlike science. Science cannot explore bit-T Truth because science is nothing more than a tool, like a crescent wrench, or a strong judicial system.

Tools- Science, Crescent wrenches, hope, and a strong judicial system are all tools that we use to get things done. They are beliefs, not truths. It is improper to say that science is true because science is necessarily founded on the premise that better science will eventually come. How can Truth be better or worse? It cannot. Truth is static and either is or is not. The kind of truth that science encompasses is not in fact Truth at all, but storytelling, a fiction of sorts, that enables human beings to do things. It's like a U.V. filter.

When we drop a scientific theory over the way that we see the world, the world is made simple enough that we can understand how it works. However, at the same time, we are necessarily filtering out a lot of what the world has to offer. When astronomy was still based on the theory that the Earth was the focal point of the universe, astronomers were able to make calculations that correctly predicted the movements of the stars, the planets, and even predict early eclipses. However, when we moved to a model of the solar system that placed the sun at the center, all of those calculations became better, more accurate, and more simple. If scientists believed that the earth was at the center of the solar system today, we would still be able to make sense of the solar system, but we would not have progressed to easily or quickly in astronomical science.

So it must be with science, that a good scientist can never believe in any kind of big-T truth, because the next fiction that comes along, perhaps that the solar system is actually centered around a point in space that is only very near the sun, could make the calculations to Mars and back more accurate. Right now, we are only able to calculate the movements of the planets to within a couple of dozen meters or so, but if we found another point to center our universe, perhaps we could start calculating to a couple of dozen centimeters, and then perhaps millimeters as our fictions and our stories change.

So too must it be with evolution. One of the problems of the scientific and secular communities who are attempting to defend evolution is that we present it as though it is some kind of big-T Truth, but this is a basic misunderstanding of science. Big-T Truth can never change. Big-T Truth can never be adjusted and is not malleable, and it either works entirely, or leads only to disaster. Evolution is, like all science, at best, a half truth, and perhaps it is only a very small amount of truth with a lot of guess work. Evolution is a means of understanding the world that makes every known living thing come into sharper focus than it ever has before. Science must necessarily only move incrementally, while big-T truth is all or nothing. Scientists who have made evolution into some kind of bit-T truth will be desperately disappointed every time we make a discovery that brings things into sharper focus (like homo floresiensis). In a misguided attempt to defend science, they will constantly alienate those who know that science will never be able to explain everything, because science is only a tool, not a paradigm.

It is improper to say that evolution is not a theory, because if it is not a theory, but some kind of scientific fact, than human beings have reached the end point of exploration for the origins of human beings, and we have ceased to progress. Science is a belief, just as is religion, but it is not truth. Science is a belief just like when we look at a soccer ball and a net and say, "I believe in kicking." We should not say that we believe that kicking exists, that somewhere on the planet, right now, even as we speak, some child is kicking a soccer ball into a net. What we mean is that the best way to get that soccer ball into that net is to kick. When we say, "I believe in evolution." we are saying that the best way to understand the way that things work and to have those things work for us, as far as we know, is through the code book written by Darwin and his progeny. It is needless, and anti-scientific, to say that we believe in the physical existence of australopithicines, homo erectus, and homo habilis. Not only does it not matter if they actually existed, worse than that, it is anti-scientific because it speaks about the thing rather than the evidence of the thing. Scientists are allowed to use shorthand for the evidence of a thing, by saying australopithicus afrensis (think Lucy) as though it exists as a fact, but they only do so in order to build on the theory behind evolution and attempt to challenge the theory until it is best able to conform with the world. It is only a bad scientist that does not understand that evolution is only a theory, a tool, which can, for example, help us to understand generational change, which is a tool for helping us understand DNA, which is a tool for saving lives.

Religion is a belief like when we say, "I believe we are in Delaware." as we drive up I-90. Believing that we are in Deleware is a belief about the existence and relation of things. When we say "I believe in God and that he created the world." we are speaking about the existence of a deity, and his relationship to the creation of the world. Because we believe that he told us how he created the world, we also believe that the world was created a certain way, and that way cannot be modified. When we believe in God as told through the Bible, we must believe in the Bible, because it is God's book. The words are literally true, as true as any words can literally be. We can take into consideration the possibility that our understanding of the Bible is flawed, and every Christian does at some point feel that her understanding of the Bibile is flawed (usually our spiritual guides help us through those moments), but we can never question the truth of the Bible. That does not mean, however, that we must turn down medication that was only available through understanding of the theory of evoltiuon. We are all still allowed to take antibiotics despite the fact that they wouldn't be possible without the theory of evolution. Our belief in the existence of things and their relationship to one another does not change when we take that pill in order to save our own lives.

So why, then, do we feel so threatened by seeing the tool in use? Because we are confused. We think that evolution is the same as the Bible in that it pruports to be big-T truth, and for many misguided scientists it does, but the fact remains that it cannot and does not. Learning about evolution and believing in it as a way to create powerful drugs, plants, and domesticated animals that we use and enjoy every day of our lives is like learning about and believing in democracy. For millenia, the leaders of nations believed that monarchy was the only Christian way to lead a country, that to believe in democracy was literally to denegrade God. That believe seems foolish that we understand the difference between a belief in democracy and a belief in God. They are two entirely seperate beliefs. In millenia, evolution or its progeny, will still be around because it is too powerful to ignore, and too successful a tool to simply disregard. The many millions who comfortably believe in evolution as a tool and in religion as big-T truth understand that science is a tool, while religion is a life. Those who do not understand the difference between belief in God and belief in science, may never be convinced, but there numbers are dwindling, and soon they will be as outdated as monarchists and fuedelists.

Why Intelligent Design Cannot Be Science.

2009-04-01T08:47:00.000-07:00

Intelligent deign is based upon the premise that the universe is being directed by some kind of intelligence, be it the Judeo-Islamo-Christian God or some other intelligent universal director. Intelligent Design was originally a theory put forward by some turn of the century philosophers to explain how science and religion are compatible. The basic premise, as put forward by Alfred North Whitehead, was that science describes mechanisms, and religion describes purpose. The difference between these two descriptions is the difference of the two meanings of the word "because."

"Because" is defined as "for the reason that" in Merriam-Websters. There are two kinds of reasons for things. One is the mechanical reason. This is the physical movement behind things. An example of mechanical reason is when a woman slaps a man, the muscle in that woman's arm twitches causing her arm to twitch, which causes her arm to flail her hand, which causes the hand to slap the man's face. That chain of events is mechanical in nature. Each causation is another step in the movement towards the slap. The other kind of reason for a thing describes purpose. The woman may have struck the man because he raped her, or because he pinched her ass, or because she remembered a man from her childhood that looked like the man. Both of these reasons are necessary to the slap. That is to say that neither of these kinds of causes are sufficient. Neither of these kinds of reasons are more or less correct or accurate than the other. However, when we are trying to figure out what caused the slap, we talk about two very different things. A biologist is needed to determine how the mechanical cause worked. A moral adjudicator (a judge, a priest, a philosopher) or social scientist of some kind is needed to determine the ultimate purpose of the slap.

Biological inquiry is ultimately an attempt to answer the question "Why does that thing work the way it does?" In the example of the woman slapping the man, biology can say, "the muscle twitched, and the arm twitched, and the hand twitched." That information is valuable for finding out which part of the arm is broken if the woman suddenly finds that she can't slap the man any longer. Biology cannot hope to answer the bigger question of why the woman decided to slap the man. The most biology can say about purpose is that the muscle twitched "because the woman told it to twitch." Similarly when someone asks why does life exist the way it does, evolution can say, "because natural selection combined with mating selection tendencies, genetic mutations" etc etc. These processes can help us understand what goes on when we have genetic diseases, cancers, or in helping Watson and Crick discover DNA. However, intelligent design theorists are attempting to answer a different kind of question. To the question "why does life exist the way it does?" they can only answer "because someone or something told it to exist." It may very well be true, but it stops the question from being asked without answering anything about the mechanics of life.

Many intelligent design theorists cite the eugenics movement as a reason why evolution is wrong. However, the eugenics movement suffered from the same flaw as intelligent design itself when it mistook mechanical cause for purpose. If science stops attempting to find mechanical cause, science ceases to be science and starts to be philosophy or religion. Biology cannot simply stop and say that "an intelligent being created that," because it would be the cessation of the act of science itself. Similarly, we philosophers, clerics, and social scientists should not allow science to hijack intelligent design because the question of what purpose lies at the root of the universe is properly ours, not the material of cold, material, mechanical scientists.

Is March a Bad Time for Relationships?

2009-03-19T08:21:00.000-07:00

It used to be the case that every March I would get in some serious doldrums with my partner. This year I've been lucky, but that is the first time, I think, even though I've been with my current partner for the last two Marches also. I have an unsubstantiated theory that March is bad on relationships. Perhaps it's spring fever. Perhaps I'm crazy. Any thoughts?

Slumdog is About America, not India

2009-02-27T06:09:00.000-08:00

Protests in India over Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire have puzzled some in America. At the same time that we are inspired to visit India, and maybe even take one of those “slum tours,” some in India, including major Bollywood actors and some politicians, have decried the film as “Poverty Porn.” We in America see the movie as optimistic, even great, and hail it with Golden Globe after SAG Award after Oscar.

This dissonance can be explained by the fact that Slumdog Millionaire is really about America. Danny Boyle creates a fantasy land, and like all fantasy lands there are great dangers that await the heroes of Slumdog. Instead of goblins and trolls, we have religious conflicts and slavers. We in America are familiar with both. However, unlike the Revolutionary War, Slumdog’s religious conflict does not involve Christians, and unlike Jamaica, the slavers are not “white” as we understand the word “white” to be used. The problem is not that this fantasy world is pornographic. All fantasy worlds are pornographic in the way that they allow us to act on our greatest and most secret desires. Danny Boyle’s own Trainspotting, Millions, and 28 Days Later all present us with worlds filled with these same kinds of gratification fantasies. The problem with Slumdog is the fact that progressives in America have given such importance to it. Our friends call us to tell us that it is “eye opening” and reviewers (writing for no less than the New York Times) call it a lesson in “cross cultural understanding.”

For an America that is suddenly in the control of the Democrats, this movie is important because it is progressive and distinctly American. In Slumdog, the entire fantasy world is endangered, not by the Great Eye of Mordor, but by the kind of poverty that progressives rail against. And the hero in the film is the Game Show. What could be more American and hopeful than a Game Show. It’s as if Ronald McDonald himself came down in his Coca-Cola shaped rocket ship and gave everybody Wal-Mart gift certificates. And it is not just the hero that is saved by this doppelganger for American culture. The entire Indian nation seems to be caught up in the moment. India's cross cultural lesson is the Great American Myth that no matter how poor you are, if you keep trying and working hard, some day you will succeed. The myth rings hollow to an India currently hurtling up the list of the worlds largest economies while leaving behind the poorest and the most needy, but we in America are much more easily convinced.

The newly progressive leaning America loves this film because it is the satisfaction of three of our most secret and powerful desires. The first is that our economy will fix itself. We don’t need to make sacrifices, like those of us who have jobs paying higher taxes, and making deep cuts into our largest and most wasteful spending (military spending and laissez faire health care). If we give our economy a nudge and a little time, we too will soon be millionaires. Every game show and lottery in history is essentially this kind of solvency porn. The second progressive desire is that we will no longer be seen throughout the world as the malevolent and violent imperial power. In Slumdog, it is Hollywood and not the Pentagon that represents America. The American influence in Slumdog is the game show, and a couple of American tourists who wise crack “This is the real America” while giving a desperately poor orphan a $100 bill. While both of these symbols spread a powerful myth, they are doing so with money and wit instead of with bullets and body armor. This is benevolent imperialism, where we can spread the myth with kindness the way that the Catholic preachers struck out with their missions into the Heart of Darkness or the Georgian Cherokee tribes. Progressive Americans see this form of imperialism as a stark contrast to the preemptive attacks of the last eight years. But our greatest and most secret desire that is satisfied with this progressive porn romp is that everything is going to be okay for all those orphan children living in extreme poverty throughout the world. Those are the children that we had drilled into our brain every time that we didn’t finish our vegetables who were “starving in China.” This movie reassures us by showing us that the child will not starve even if we do not finish our vegetables. It shows us that the children that make our coffee in slavery conditions in Ghana will eventually grow up to own the plantation. It allows us to say that the children begging for change in the markets in Cairo are better off than those who were blinded or mutilated for the same purpose. With this knowledge, we can go out and buy the blouse made in Bangladesh with Turkmen cotton, because in the end, everything is going to turn up Bollywood.

Illegal Immigrants Are Not Criminals

2009-02-19T05:26:00.000-08:00

It seems that there are many people out there who misunderstand the difference between illegal and criminal. The chief evidence that I have for that is the sheer number of bloggers that claim that being an "illegal immigrant" means that one is a criminal. That's like saying that driving 5mph over the speed limit is the same as being a drunk driver.

I can let you know this right now. If you have ever gone 5mph over the speed limit, your are an illegal driver. That's right. You. If you've gone 10mph over the speed limit, I'd say you're probably a very illegal driver. But speeding is not criminal. Drunk driving is criminal. When you drive drunk, you can go to jail and get probation, when you go 5mph over the speed limit, you can only be fined. It is purely an accident of history that the police arrest criminals and hand out speeding tickets. Just like a grocery store that has a pharmacy, you can get your oysters and your Viagra in the same place, but that doesn't mean that you have to have a prescription to get oysters.

Similarly, with the IRS, if Capone misunderstood which moving costs were legitimate tax credits and which moving costs were not, he would get zinged in an audit because what Capone did was illegal. However, Capone was not a criminal for misunderstanding the IRS code. If that were the case, we would all be criminals because the IRS code is about as coherent as a one legged aardvark doing the electric slide. Al Capone was a criminal because he purposefully hid income from the police. That is Tax Fraud, and that is a crime.

Many people have latched on to the word illegal in the description of people's immigration status and equated that with criminal, but they are simply wrong (or hateful, or ignorant, or stupid). They are annoyed about the fact that police can't deport people who are illegal immigrants when they are pulled over for speeding, but of course there must be restrictions on what the police can do. We can't allow police to enforce codes that are not criminal. If we did that, the next time a police officer pulled you over, he could run an audit of your taxes and demand back payment before you were allowed to leave. That same officer could hold business owners until they brought their businesses up to code. That same officer could then interrogate you on whether or not you had committed any labor violations, and then use that information to make sure that your grass is short enough in front of your house, that you don't have any cracks in any of your windows at home, and that you have cleaned up all the dog poop in your backyard. A world where illegal means criminal is called a police state. If people want to create one of those here, they are going to have to go through me first.

There are a significant amount of studies that have proved that people who are in violation of immigration laws are far less likely to commit crimes. That is probably because if you or I steal a Snickers bar, we would probably get probation, maybe serve 90 days, but if an illegal immigrant drives without his seat belt (which is a crime, not a traffic code violation in most states), he could be deported. Most of the other Nationalist Purificationist's claims are also bogus. Illegal immigrants are less likely than the general population to default on a mortgage, are more likely to be actively working, practically never collect unemployment benefits or social security, and seldom use public medical services.

Overall, as has always been the case, illegal immigrants are some of our best citizens. The hated Chinese immigrant population of San Fransisco in the 1850's (nicknamed the yellow tide) developed the powerful California economy, while the despised Japanese immigrant population of the 1940's never once committed any act of sabotage on U.S. shores and the famous Japanese battalion on the Pacific front suffered the greatest percentage of wounded and killed soldiers of any battalion in the U.S. Army. Other immigrant populations that were the objects of scorn include the English, the German, the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews. Oh and lets not forget about the Africans. They were legal immigrants by American standards. The greatest irony of our nations recent anti-immigrant fervor is their theme song "God Bless America" which was written by an immigrant Jew while our borders were still so open with Russia that there were no visas or passports. In those days, the illegal immigrants were mostly from China and Japan because the U.S. put quotas on the number of immigrants that we could accept from those countries. Those illegal immigrants were the ones who brought us such American fare as fried chicken, canned salmon (and tuna) and used irrigation techniques that managed to turn the barren California landscape into what is now a huge agricultural industry.

Perhaps it is the failure of the progressive wing of this country that instead of explaining to people what illegal actually means, we chose to PC-the-whole-thing-up with the term "undocumented worker." First of all, the term is false because they are usually documented somehow. Also, the term inherently restricts those people from getting services that may put them into the documentation status. As long as they are "undocumented" workers, we are limited in arguing that they should be able to receive the same protections as documented workers, because those protections naturally require documentation. Also, the term leaves the word "illegal" in the irresponsible hands of the Nationalist Purificationist crowd that wants to criminalize those who are not. It is time to use our privilege to reclaim the word illegal. We should all refer to ourselves as illegal drivers, illegal home owners, and illegal employees. The baffled questions that follow will form the groundwork for putting illegality and criminality into proper context, because if we tell the truth, and they continue to lie, we will always be the more believable.

2- Are sagging pants indicative of ones "disrespect for themselves?"

2008-12-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

A new assertion has come out regarding sagging pants. Councilwoman Judy Green of the 1st District of Louisville, KY asserts that "the trend has a history in slavery, when masters wouldn't allow males to wear belts as a way to degrade them." (The quote is from the Louisville Courier-Journal 12/7/2008. The council woman is paraphrased in the quote by reporter Dan Klepal.)

The councilwoman's assertion about the history of sagging pants seems to be entirely fabricated. Pants were not often worn with belts in the U.S. until the end of the 1850's when, in 1857, a buckle was added to the back side of men's trousers in order to make the trousers taper in at the top (this information comes courtesy of Joan Nunn, the author of "Fashion in Costume" printed by A&C Black Publishers in 2000). Even that buckle however was not a belt, but merely an attachment to the gentlemen's drawstring. Images of that same time period (readily available for study at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division website) show slaves and poor whites both without belts of any kind, except some in the Irish Immigrant population who wore wide belts and were, and continue to be, caricatured for their belts (think Lucky Charms guy). For centuries people have been holding up their pants with drawstrings, and perhaps that's what she meant, but I find no record of a punishment by removing one's drawstring, and the few photos we have of slaves at work show their pants tightly cinched to their waists, probably with drawstrings. Furthermore, it would be unproductive to force slaves to work without drawstrings, as trousers in the 19th century did not stay up in any way with the drawstring, not even to the extent that sagging pants stay up today. Without further evidence, I can only conclude that, if such a punishment existed, it was rare and hardly a symbol of the degradation of black slaves at large. There were some other underclasses that wore belts to carry their gun holsters, such as trappers and soldiers. The trapping profession was not to be admired. Soldiers wore a belt across the waist and a sash across the chest to keep the belt up because of all the weight carried on the belt. These were clearly not the kinds of belts that kept up one's pants. Indeed, according to USHistory.com, the union uniforms in 1862 had a chord sewn into the trousers to keep their pants from falling despite the belt worn outside the uniform. While many military officers (both north and south) wore sashes, again they didn't keep up one's pants, and sagging would not have been a symbol of having one's sash removed. It is true that black men, even serving in the north, were not allowed to be officers (and therefore wear a sash), but they could still keep their pants as high as they wished by tightening their drawstrings. If we wanted to show how far black men have come, maybe it would be a better symbol to wear brightly colored sashes outside one's clothes, but that is not a common fashion trend today. According to Levi Strauss' website, belt loops, to hold the kind of belt that we think of today, were not added to Levi's until the 1920's. The myth that sagging pants came out of prison is difficult to prove or disprove, but much of the evidence leans against Councilwoman Green's assertion that slave owners denied slaves belts in order to demean the slaves. It baffles me that people make so many assertions about sagging pants without cite or proof. Why would so many people do that? What is Councilwoman Green attempting to get out of asserting that sagging pants are derogatory?

Anyone who is interested in racial and gender equity in our nation is understandably frustrated. We who wish for our society to make progress are casting blame around. Despite the fact that we have just elected the first black president, schools are more segregated now than they were when Justice Marshall successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education. Despite all the loss of life and arrests throughout the last five decades of struggle, there is still great disparity in wages between whites and all other people who self-identify as "minorities." The wealth gap between blacks and whites is even larger than the wage gap, and is getting larger, unlike the wage gap which is shrinking. In other words, blacks are getting poorer, whites are getting richer, and for all of our talk about how much has changed, very little actually has changed, and much that has change is for the worse.

Councilwoman Green wants to make more black men into success stories. She sees black men in suits, carrying briefcases, and wearing their pants at their waists as success stories, while black men in gangs and out on the streets wearing sagging pants are unsuccessful. She then tries to tie this dichotomy to the historical subjugation of black men by tying sagging pants to slavery. In doing so, she may be casting a wider net than she intends. Many black men wear sagging pants, not because they want to join a gang, or commit crimes, but because it's a fashion trend. Some black men wear the business suit in the day and then put on other clothes at night to go to the nightclub. Some black men work at the night club and hold successful careers in the entertainment industry. These black men wear sagging pants, clean jerseys, clean white pairs of kicks, and a tilted pro back Yankees caps over do rags because they don't want to look "neutral." What is neutral?
When Catherine MacKinnon insinuates that we are all either rapists, or the raped, she is trying to make a factual, not a normative statement, but because the statement is universal, we must ask ourselves, "would I rather be the rapist or the raped?" Similarly, Councilwoman Green's myth about sagging pants put us in the position of asking, "would I rather be like the slave, or like the slave master?" If those who wear their pants low are like slaves, then who are the rest of us supposed to be like? In a society where we all aspire to the American dream, aren't we really aspiring to the white American dream? When some black men wear sagging pants they are saying, "I don't believe in that American dream, I want to create a society that has a place for me and my history." Maybe those who are wearing their pants low aren't make themselves "slave-like" as Green insinuates, but they are trying to be "un-master-like." They are attempting to become successful, without becoming a part of an "American Dream" that is always already raced and gendered. By tying these people to those who are unsuccessful, the Councilwoman is undermining their efforts at equality, while at the same time she is tying equality to a vision of the successful American male that looks a little bit more "neutral," which is to say, a little bit more white.

On the other hand, many groups have been able to attain a piece of the American Dream. That is to say that we call some groups merely American, when we used to include an adjective. We can no longer fill out Irish, Italian, or Jewish on our driver's licenses. Despite the fact that Irish were once considered black and commonly demeaned with the "n"-word, they have made the transition to whiteness, and therefore they fit neatly into the neutral American Dream. Maybe black males can eventually become white just as their Irish, Italian, and German brothers did before them. Maybe, however, the closest they can get to the raced and gendered American Dream is the glass ceiling felt the most significantly by Asian Americans. Despite educational opportunities, and generations of business success, Asian Americans have not managed equality in business, or in political representation. Scholars refer to the problems involved in being the "model minority." A place of adoration, in which one has limited opportunity for greater success. Green's vision of the black male who does not sag, may be an excellent first step towards equality, but it ignores the difficulties of Asian Americans and South Asian Americans who cannot gain the equality that earlier European immigrants did. Maybe it's because our society is changed and is more exclusive that Asian Americans have hit such a substantial glass ceiling, or maybe it's simply because Asian Americans are easily identifiable and simply will never be white enough for the American Dream. In other words, maybe it is the American Dream that has to change, not the height of a man's pants.

1- What do Sagging Pants Signify and Why Do We Care?

2008-12-05T12:34:00.001-08:00

Why are people so determined to end a fashion trend, however fickle or even "shocking?" I have some ideas, and would like to explore them here:

Sagging Pants = Criminality.
Of course the big myth is that people who sag their pants do so because they have been to prison where people cannot wear belts because the prisoners are on suicide watch. Prisoners aren't the only people who don't wear belts. Psychiatric patients, people who don't own belts, plumbers, and many other people have sagging pants. If the prison myth is true, it is because prisons give ill fitting clothes to their prisoners. In that respect, sagging pants is a nod to the carelessness with which we treat our prisoners. Some say that we should be careless with prisoners because they deserve it. That is to say, that it is just that we treat prisoners with the same disregard that they treated society when they committed whatever crime it was that put them in prison in the first place. Is that our reason for keeping people in prison? If we are going to spend some $30,000 a year to keep each individual in prison, we are going to have to eventually let them out and back into society. I think most people agree that most prisoners should eventually be released. There aren't too many people outside of the Taliban who argue for life or death for marijuana consumption. If we do have to release prisoners, don't we wish that our money were being spent wisely, not carelessly. Are sagging pants a reminder of that carelessness, and because we live in a republican society, is that a reminder of our own carelessness? Many people who wear sagging pants have never been to prison, and there is absolutely no hard link of any kind connecting sagging pants to prison, except in the minds of those who insist that sagging pants have in fact derived from prisons. However, many have linked sagging pants and prison. That link would be disturbing if it were an indicator to those people in society that our justice system is in tatters. The fact that young men (and women) purposefully emulate prisoners tells us something about our society that we hate to admit. It tells us that there are many who prefer to look and act like the ostracized, rather than partake willingly as full fledged citizens in our society. Is our prison system so pleasant, or is it that our justice system is so unjust that young people attempt to cast off its legitimacy by invoking the lowest victims of that justice system? More to come.

Very Nervous...

2008-12-05T12:18:00.000-08:00

Obama was supposed to bring in a new era of economics and foreign policy. So far, I am very nervous. Mind you, he hasn't done anything yet, but the people that he's appointed scream of the tragic destruction that our economy and foreign policy suffered under Clinton, and Bush. It seems disingenuous to campaign for change and then appoint the same old people all over again. I fear for the worst, but I am still hoping for the best. If Obama cannot control his cabinet, if he does not make it clear who is in charge from day one, we're going to find ourselves with more of the same. More Clintonites, Bushistas, and McCain B.S. That's not good enough. Please, Mr. President Elect. We are your base. Not the hawkish right, or the pseudo-progressive Clintonites (who are only so progressive as serves the "big businesses" that support them). Your movement came from a new left, and you have a responsibility to represent that new left. It is time to stand up for change, not talk about it and then hire the same old foxes to guard the hen house.