More Liberated Than Ever

I am glad to be back to digging in to politics, race, class, and especially gender on right be done. The last job I took was all consuming, so all consuming that I quit. So I'm back. I'm trying to be a bit lighter, a bit sillier, and a bit less mean, but there's only so much a coot like me can do, so here goes.

I am buying new furniture.

In this case, the furniture that I am considering buying is AWESOME! It is unbelievably cool, elegant, and efficient. Essentially, I am buying Murphy Beds on steroids. But you don't have to trust me on this account. Check out the video of this furniture transitioning HERE.

This bed is called the Ito, like "If the glove don't fit..,"

And I know you aren't reading this because you are interested in the living section of People magazine, although you might be, but that's not why you're reading this. However, for the last 6 years, it has been the basic tenant of this blog that every action we have is always already laden with prejudice, and that extends to the furniture we buy.

So how is my furniture purchase laden with prejudice? Well, this is a purchase made necessary by choices driven by a liberation philosophy. On the opposite end of liberation philosophy is "Extreme Mascunility." A major tenant of extreme masculinity is that men must subjectify themselves, that is to say that they must be the subjects of their actions, instead of the objects. This is an obvious corollary to the objectifying that men do with women, notably in the famous meat grinder Hustler cover seen here.

She looks cold.

By the way, the image on the left was this year's December Playboy cover, as posted on Sharenator.

So much for keeping it light...

Like the boy scouts, the subjectified man must always "be prepared." If we are not prepared, we may find ourselves objectified, and we all know what objectification leads too, right ladies? (For reference, see Hustler's 1978 cover.)



Subjectified men are large and in charge. It is a sad fact of history that whenever too much masculinity gets comfortable, something gets conquered. In the latest installment of the ridiculous reality show that is Extreme Masculinity, American suburban men are conquering their landscapes with their McMansions. After all, our home is our castle, and we must rule all we can see.

Being prepared, and being large and in charge are as closely related as newly weds in Arkansas (that one was for you, Steph), and both play a substantial role in how men choose to live. In a society where capitalism is corrupted by commercialism, wherever there is a need, there is something to fill that need, and sometimes if there is no need, there is a marketing campaign that will create a need.

Picking up our dogs poop with a bag may be the time-tested way of dealing with that problem, but Martha Stewart will sell a pooper scooper (see left) that will do it for us faster, cleaner, and more wastefully. Renting a rug shampooer, or hiring someone to shampoo a rug would objectify us, so we buy a cut rate carpet shampooer to do it ourselves. Once a year or so, we need a truck, so we buy a truck and haul it around with us for the other 350 days. Our cars are awesome, our televisions are terrific, our tools can repair anything, our collections are complete, our technology is up-to-date, our carpets are shampooed, and our pooper is mother-fucking scoopered. Don't worry, we think to ourselves, we got this.

Metastasizing McMansion complex.

In order to keep all of this preparation in our homes, we need a garage for our truck(s), a basement to store our carpet cleaner, a shed for our tools, a room dedicated solely to our televisions, and so on and so forth. Thus was born the McMansion. A real man never has to make a choice. If we want something, we conquer it.

But we are all always already both subjects and objects in life. We are all reliant on our societies, our families, our friends, our coworkers, our communities, and yes our government, just as they are all reliant on us. Human beings are super-socializers by nature and necessity. And the line between subject and object is as imaginary as Obamacare death panels. The true path to liberation isn't encapsulating ourselves in fiefdoms made of ticky-tacky. Men must liberate ourselves. We must stop taking our lessons from "Preppers," and start reinvesting in our neighborhoods and our families.

With all of this in mind, I decided that liberation means living smaller, slower, and more socially. I decided that not "conquering" means living sustainably with a lifestyle that is more familiar in the rest of the globally developed nations, particularly in Europe and Japan. That means making choices and setting priorities. That means making do, which is the part of "being prepared" that I chose to keep from extreme masculinity.

It is sad that we are losing the philosophy of "making do" in all of this commercialized ecstasy. It is sad because study after study shows that people are happier when they do prioritize, and when they make do. Study after study shows that the house, the car, the job, and even Martha Stewart's Pooper Scooper can make us happy for up to a year, but usually more like six months, and it is simply not worth the debt,  the stress, the carbon footprint, the water demands, and the deep neurotic need to objectify the people in our lives. Because after the six months of happiness are over, the problems remain.

When I talk like that, people think I'm being a martyr. When I say I like living smaller, slower, and more socially, they think I mean that my conscience likes it. But when I look at the Ito above, I realize that modern engineering has made it possible to live comfortably and truly happily without all the toys, and without the McMansion. And when I see this beautiful desk that we will be putting in for one of the boys, I am glad that I am handing on that realization to the next generation. Because when we live small, we bump into one another. And when we bump into our loved ones, our neighbors, and our community, we are forced to think differently, and stretched to be happier, more liberated people.

Thanks for reading again after all this time.

Living Without Gender: A Conversation with a Trailblazer

Making Men Interview- 

Beau Laurence 7/5/2012 at the Gypsy Coffee House in Capitol Hill

Gypsy Coffee House

When I asked hir for an interview, Beau Laurence wanted to meet me beneath the fabric folds hanging from the ceiling at the Gypsy Coffee House. Beau is thin and freckled, with an Irish face and hair cropped in a pixie cut. Xi joked with a  straight face, and leaned forward in hir chair for most of our 90 minute interview, thinking and picking hir words with the intensity of a scholar.

Peeing in the Gender Woods

For Right Be Done, I was interested in hir thoughts about masculinity. Xi is making a conscious choice to adopt some of masculinity, keep some of femininity, and move to something new. If men are ever to be liberated, we must make the same kinds of choices as Beau. Because no conversation about masculinity can ignore our historical relationship to it, I started by asking about hir past. Surprisingly, Beau answered by talking about how we toilet.

Right Be Done (RBD): What is your earliest memory of what it means to be a man?

Beau Lawrence (BL): Probably the earliest difference that I remember is about how boys go to the bathroom. So, I have a brother who is two years older, and I grew up… I was born into, and until I was 10, we lived in a commune and I was the first female child. There were three boys. They were older than me. My brother and two other boys. So, I didn’t have other girls to hang out with when I was a little kid, I just had the boys.

Girls Peeing in Urinal by Paul Avril

So, we all played together. They climbed trees, so I did all of these activities and didn’t think anything of my body being different, or "I’m not supposed to do that," until it came to actually urinating and it was like, “Wait. I don’t have that. That doesn’t work for me.” I specifically remember asking my dad to teach me how to pee standing up so that I could be like the other boys. Because to me it wasn’t a boy/girl thing, it was a kid thing. Like, I couldn’t do what the other kids did. But I was the youngest one, so it’s like, you know in your kid brain, you don’t necessarily revert to gender as the reason you couldn’t do this. It’s, “I’m the youngest one and I haven’t learned yet and I want to be like the big kids and do this.”

RBD: What did your dad say?

BL: My dad was like, “Okay.” And I actually did learn. Then, I was at my grandmothers and I was like, “You wanna see?” And she was like, “you will never do that again.” That’s when I learned that it was definitely not a girl thing to do and that I was a girl. It was really her that sort of reinforced what a girl was NOT, more than, “This is what boys or men are like.”

In a society where “man” is neutral, it is normal for someone who was raised as a girl to learn only what man is not. Perhaps, the biggest problem with feminism has been that we have not discussed traditional masculinity from an objective point of view. However, Beau later told me about one person in hir life that did create from scratch a conscious definition of what it meant to be a man.  Television isn’t normally a place to break stereotypes, but xi cited one example of a man who strayed from convention.

The Radical Politics of Mork and Mindy 

BL: I hadn’t thought about T.V. shows until you asked this question. Lone Ranger.

RBD: Supermale. The Lone Ranger is definitely a super male.

BL: I remember being really offended. I was always really offended the way that he treated Tonto. I was really hyper-aware of… Wow this really is kind of awful, but straight white men were always pigs, and so whatever they did was definitely like, there are other ways to be because there are other males, and there are strong females, but these white males are awful.

Fair use for political comment,
from Mork and Mindy publicity.

BL (Cont): But, the first thing that popped into my head as an alternative male T.V. character was Mork from Mork and Mindy.

RBD: But wasn’t he an alien.

BL: He was an alien, but…

RBD: So, he wasn’t really a man.

BL: He was an alien impersonating what it was like to be a male getting coached by Mindy.

RBD: Strangers in a Strange Land sort of masculinity where he had this opportunity to point out how ridiculous masculinity was.

BL: And he could do really fun.., really childlike sorts of things and get corrected for doing gender wrong.

The writer’s of Mork and Mindy gave America a chance to question basic assumptions of masculinity, the same kind of assumptions that this blog is attempting to undermine. And here I thought I was being a radical when in fact Hollywood did it 40 years ago and in tight pants.

Condescending to be Helpful

Later, I asked about the best and the worst traits of masculinity.

RBD: So what is the worst trait that has traditionally been associated with the word masculinity?

BL: Certainly patriarchy. And condescension. But those really aren’t unique to masculinity.

RBD: What makes condescension in particular traditionally masculine?

BL: It’s so hard to separate the traditional concept of masculinity. It's so wrapped up in white northern European culture that it’s kind of like, “It’s all the same.” It may be more that whiteness, that religiousness, more than masculinity that [condescension] comes from. That manifest destiny, we know better, we’re chosen by god, sort of everything is our minion. Women and children and people of color are our property. That to me is the worst thing about traditional masculinity.

RBD: How about the best thing about traditional masculinity? The best trait?

BL: I struggle with this because the thing that I, throughout my life, have sort of really maybe wanted to emulate more than anything else is not necessarily a positive quality, but the self sacrificing is sort of…

RBD: I call it loyalty.

BL: But not just loyalty. Chivalry is a real awful thing that implies condescension and all of that negative, but the, “I’m going to take the burden on so that somebody else doesn’t have to,” is something that I’ve always really liked. I know that in a lot of ways it’s not healthy because it’s a lot of it ego, but I have always enjoyed being the kind of person that would give my seat to somebody else. Or carry something that was really heavy so that somebody didn’t have to. And it wasn’t that they’re not capable of doing it, but that I’m strong and capable, and I can help in this way. And I think that’s something I value about masculinity. That sort of willingness to, not help the old lady across the street, but sort of like, you need somebody to move heavy furniture, I can do that, and it doesn’t have to be somebody who has a penis that does it. But I think that there is that attitude of masculinity in that offer.

RBD: In a way it seems like two sides of the same coin. The thing that you dislike the worst (condescension) and the thing that you like the best about masculinity (helpfulness).

Petersburg- Caviar by Walter Smith

BL: And that’s what I really struggle with actually. And as I broaden my own awareness of who I can be, and it doesn’t have to be butch or femme. There’s been a lot of that sort of cafeteria masculinity, picking and choosing what you want to keep and what you want to reject, and it’s not just all bad. And the parts that I have traditionally thought of as good, have their origins in something that’s not necessarily positive.

The idea of cafeteria masculinity is close to the image of liberated men that I hold in my imagination. I originally conceived of writing an article about hors gendered folks for that very reason. We men who are seeking liberation are looking for role models ourselves. We are looking for people to pave the path to freedom. Those like Beau who have decided to take on the underpinnings of gender are acting as our Moses, leading us out of the constructs that have kept us in lives of solitude and violence. It is hard to imagine the threat under which they live as a result. The reaction to non-conforming gender is morbidly violent, and theirs is a unique courage born of a mix of desperation for acceptance and a rebellious character. Regardless of Beau’s reasons for trailblazing our liberation, we owe hir and those like hir a debt of gratitude.

Breaking Down Stereotypes 

At the end of our interview, we spent a long time just letting the conversation flow, and at one point I wondered if xi felt like society was becoming more free because of the breaking down of traditional gender norms in society at large.

BL: It is, but here’s the double-edged sword about all that. In the kinds of circles that I’ve traveled in, the radical political stuff. When there’s a meeting, people go around and introduce themselves and say what gender pronoun they prefer. It is sort of a thing for a lot of people to say, “It doesn’t matter.” And that’s really marginalizing and erasing for those of us who have to choose and are so aware of the choices that we make and that other people make. So when an obviously cis-gendered straight man says, “Oh, you can call me ‘she,’ I won’t be offended.”

Beau Laurence's profile pic from Facebook.

That’s really a place of privilege to be able to say that. "You do your gender so well that you won’t be offended if you are called 'she.'" For those of us who may not do gender very well, what other people perceive us as has a huge emotional impact, so that place of, “It doesn’t matter,” is like, “You’re not really taking seriously that it matters so much for some of us.”

RBD: That’s true, but being exposed to non-normative gender associations can break those stereotypes for cis-people.

BL: It absolutely can, and just like every other thing, this is sort of the natural way of progress. You have these very rigid boxes, and they start to get broken up, and then you have conventionally perceived or attitudinally conventional people who then start to co-opt the language. And that is something that is a natural progression, but it’s annoying.

(If you have a complicated relationship with masculinity, and would like to have your life broadcast on this blog, please contact me to set up your own Making Men Interview.)

Dancer in the Park

A grand jete. Photo by Franny Schertzer

Yesterday, I took my son to the zoo. We found a park in between the giraffes and the camels and started doing our game I call "Jetes." If you have any dance training at all, you'll recognize a jete as a leap. From ballet it has been adopted by almost every other form of dance because, hey, dancers love to leap. As we play jetes, my son and I leap around going as high in the air as we can and shouting, "jete, jete" at the top of our lungs, regardless of the company we are keeping.

It is an unusual game, but it is a game that has inspired a great deal of other children (and some teenagers) to replicate us. Dance is the purest embodiment of joy in the universe. There is no barrier, no limb or appendage, no part of your consciousness between yourself and an expression of energy and exuberance when you are allowing yourself to give way to dance. And watching my son reflecting my amateur park dancing, I felt pride that my son was so uninhibited and expressive. In liberating myself from masculanization, I discovered a fulfilling emotional life, and I have given my son the chance to free himself.

Another family was nearby, and our lyrical steps soon led us into their midst. A five-year-old boy in a soccer shirt and pair of shiny sport shorts approached me to ask, "What are you doing?"

Kensington Park by Jospephson.

I answered, "We're doing jetes. It's a dance move."

From behind his gender drag, he asked me, "Can I see it again?"

So I did a couple of straight jetes and a ballet move that I enjoy a great deal called a grand allegro. Of course, I am terrible at these. At 6'4" and 185 pounds, my allegros are more floppy fish than soaring swan. Pretty soon, a passel of kids was chasing me around the little enclosure of grass, surrounded by the braying of animals at the zoo, the humphing of camels, a caw from a peahen, an occasional spurt of laughter from a distant hyena, and we were all leaping for the sky with our arms held suborbital over our heads.

Five children and myself leaped about on the grass as their dads watched, with expressions on their faces like I was turning leading their children out of Ireland with a pan-pipe of homosexual deviancy. However, it was not long before one of the dads pulled himself out of his bewilderment and did what men so often do when they are uncomfortable. He turned to violence.

He pulled aside the boy in gender drag and introduced him to a karate chop, then encouraged the boy to practice on him. The dancers in the park were soon ninjas on the attack. Even my own son, seeing that all of the other boys had been transitioned to acts of violence on one another, started to practice making Bruce Lee sounds while his joyful facial expression crumpled into the closest approximation of hate and intimidation that his chubby cheeks could muster.

The dad who had turned away from the deviant behavior of dance to the socially acceptable simulated violence was scowling himself, which is apparently the appropriate facial expression for men at play. I redirected my son and the girl back to peaceful and joyful dance, but my heart wasn't in it. The little boys knew their place. They had been successfully trained to know that "dance" involved pink tutus and girly slippers. Their momentary confusion that dance was something fun and powerful was just a lapse in judgment, promptly cured by Dad's reminder that they should be pretending to hurt one another.

I was reminded of one of the most instructive gender-training moments of my childhood. My own first ballet class ended in crying as I realized that I was the only boy. My fear of what it meant to be feminized drove me to wander the hallways with tears streaming down my face. If I was doing something that was for girls, did that mean that my friends, who refused to play with girls, wouldn't play with me anymore? What about all the finery that I saw on the dance floor? The tutus and leotards that I didn't own only served to show me how foreign ballet was from the life for which I was being trained. 10 years later, I started taking ballet again, this time in the early stages of a teenage rebellion that would form my belief in the necessity of men's liberation.

Virtual image by Jie Loon.

Still, for a brief moment, on the plain between the giraffes and the camels at the Denver Zoo, I was able to imagine a world where small boys were not introduced to violence as a matter of course. In this world, it is acceptable and encouraged for boys to spend their afternoons learning about jetes and grand allegros. In the world to come, perhaps even my future grandson's generation, the default game of choice with a dad will not be pretend to beat each other up, but express yourself through clumsy, but powerful, leaps.

Slut Walks: Marching Against Shame

“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.

Home Ec-quality 101

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.
  

Manifesto To Eliminate Masculinization (Part One)

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.